I work on a training website. Back in the day our website was Flash based. We had a team of animators, script writers, professional voice talent, etc. cranking out training content. People loved it and we won multiple awards. But then the ipad came out and the people who used our product adopted the iPad as their training device. Very quickly we switched from rich Flash animation to text and images with the occasional video we got from marketing. It is all the same information, but it is so incredibly boring. Usage dropped dramatically since people loved the animated content. Reading and looking at static images? Not so much. That was 10 years ago and things haven’t gotten better, at all. We really lost something special when Flash died. Somebody mentioned Adobe Animate. It really isn’t a replacement. Someday someone will create an animation tool that was as good as Flash. Maybe.
HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
221–230 of 372 posts
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
the flash/macromedia creative suite is so good, and even tho it wasn't free, it was popular (with plenty of pirated copies obviously). If your thesis is true that the web/html api could've been just as good as flash had there just been a suite of tools to create the content, then why doesn't one already exist? I think the true underlying issue is that the expectations of the users have grown - "simple" animations tha…
> then why doesn't one already exist? I think that's the big question that these threads need to be asking, because it's not just that it doesn't exist for the web. It doesn't exist anywhere for any platform. Coming in and just saying, 'HTML5 can't replicate Flash' -- not only is that inaccurate, it's unhelpful. We need to ask what modern developers need and why we seem to be unable to supply that. What are our moder…
>But that tool doesn't exist. It doesn't exist for the web, or for iOS, or for Android, or for Windows, or for any modern console. Why?
My 2 cents: the market for animation on the web collapsed due to changes in Youtube's algorithm, and Flash itself has been more or less superseded by game engines that can export to the web, 3d tools like MMD and game mods.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
the flash/macromedia creative suite is so good, and even tho it wasn't free, it was popular (with plenty of pirated copies obviously). If your thesis is true that the web/html api could've been just as good as flash had there just been a suite of tools to create the content, then why doesn't one already exist? I think the true underlying issue is that the expectations of the users have grown - "simple" animations tha…
> then why doesn't one already exist? I think that's the big question that these threads need to be asking, because it's not just that it doesn't exist for the web. It doesn't exist anywhere for any platform. Coming in and just saying, 'HTML5 can't replicate Flash' -- not only is that inaccurate, it's unhelpful. We need to ask what modern developers need and why we seem to be unable to supply that. What are our moder…
In my opinion, someone just needs to rebuild Flash, but based on modern web standards. We don’t need “productive conversations”. We already had the ideal tool - Flash. Just make a feature by feature duplication of what Flash was.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
> then why doesn't one already exist? I think that's the big question that these threads need to be asking, because it's not just that it doesn't exist for the web. It doesn't exist anywhere for any platform. Coming in and just saying, 'HTML5 can't replicate Flash' -- not only is that inaccurate, it's unhelpful. We need to ask what modern developers need and why we seem to be unable to supply that. What are our moder…
>But that tool doesn't exist. It doesn't exist for the web, or for iOS, or for Android, or for Windows, or for any modern console. Why? My 2 cents: the market for animation on the web collapsed due to changes in Youtube's algorithm, and Flash itself has been more or less superseded by game engines that can export to the web, 3d tools like MMD and game mods.
But Flash collapsed before YouTube really became popular. It was the iPhone and the iPad coming out without flash support that really killed flash. YouTube didn’t have anything to do with it. If anything, YouTube got popular because of the death of Flash - it filled the void.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows, and occasionally on Mac. Everybody else on mobile and Linux got ignored This is my view as well. Windows on x86 was the golden child. Linux was the hated bastard at best (anyone remember switching between OSS, ALSA and PulseAudio to eke any sound out of the plugin?). And even that only on x86. ARM? What, you mean that's a processor architectur…
I remember configuring NSPluginWrapper in order to get the 32 bit Flash plugin to work on 64 bit Linux (and FreeBSD). God that was nasty, as soon as YouTube launched the html5 beta I erased Flash player from every device I owned.
Heh, I've all but forgotten about that pervasive use of flash. We came out of the dark ages, that feels good.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#226The tweet mentions that you could 'just' send an SWF file to someone and it played. Well, if anybody had to fix a computer, or hosted anything Flash-based during that era, then they would know that's bullshit. Sure maybe with the standalone Flash player it worked allright, but that's not how people really used Flash. Even in my experience, a single SWF running locally didn't always work across all versions of Flash p…
I think what they mean is that it when it worked, it worked the same everywhere. Barely any testing was required because flash always played the same in every browser on every computer. Which was nice.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#227The tweet mentions that you could 'just' send an SWF file to someone and it played. Well, if anybody had to fix a computer, or hosted anything Flash-based during that era, then they would know that's bullshit. Sure maybe with the standalone Flash player it worked allright, but that's not how people really used Flash. Even in my experience, a single SWF running locally didn't always work across all versions of Flash p…
Agreed. As someone who learned games programming in Flash, and loved Flash, and benefited quite a bit from it -- no, you couldn't just email someone an SWF. That never worked. Nobody had a standalone Flash player installed that wasn't in a browser, and when I moved to newer versions of Flash, I would regularly run into problems where someone would have a Flash player that didn't support the stuff I was trying to do.…
Sending an email with SWF was not the intention, but you could easily host your SWF anywhere and give a URL and they could play your game, most of the time cross platform except those few years where they weren't updating the linux SWF player to the latest version (which got fixed again later). If you can't host it yourself, you could put it on websites like newgrounds.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
> then why doesn't one already exist? I think that's the big question that these threads need to be asking, because it's not just that it doesn't exist for the web. It doesn't exist anywhere for any platform. Coming in and just saying, 'HTML5 can't replicate Flash' -- not only is that inaccurate, it's unhelpful. We need to ask what modern developers need and why we seem to be unable to supply that. What are our moder…
In my opinion, someone just needs to rebuild Flash, but based on modern web standards. We don’t need “productive conversations”. We already had the ideal tool - Flash. Just make a feature by feature duplication of what Flash was.
That already exists - it's flash's creative suite from adobe, and it exports to html5/canvas. Now of course, it's harder to pirate since it's a subscription service now-a-days (like photoshop).
I don't think the problem is a lack of tools. It's more fundamental.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#229The difference in authoring tool is the big one here. Flash let artists and even kids (like myself aged 12) start making really fun interactive websites that could be hosted very very simply.
But I lay the blame for that with Adobe. Why didn’t they just adapt the Flash application to output html and JavaScript? If you can compile modern JS to old with babbel I don’t see why they couldn’t have an interpreter to turn action script into JS and render everything to a canvas. They had a massive community who would have loved it. Instead they just kinda gave up.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
>But that tool doesn't exist. It doesn't exist for the web, or for iOS, or for Android, or for Windows, or for any modern console. Why? My 2 cents: the market for animation on the web collapsed due to changes in Youtube's algorithm, and Flash itself has been more or less superseded by game engines that can export to the web, 3d tools like MMD and game mods.
But Flash collapsed before YouTube really became popular. It was the iPhone and the iPad coming out without flash support that really killed flash. YouTube didn’t have anything to do with it. If anything, YouTube got popular because of the death of Flash - it filled the void.
OK fair enough, although there was a big animation community on Youtube and it did get wiped by the algorithm, I'm probably misremembering the timeline.