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Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

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Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#301

Post by krtkush »

taneem wrote: post #251

During 1999-2000, I helped hundreds of people learn how to use Flash. I was, looking back now, probably one of the top experts on Flash 4 at the time in the world. The twist - I was a 15 year old living in a tiny African country called Lesotho. Lesotho is pretty isolated from the world. Nobody even knows it exists. Living there, Silicon Valley might as well be on Mars. However, we used to get issues of Wired Magazine…

Flash is the reason why I'm a programmer today. It was Flash which kindled my interest in computers and made sure I spent hours playing around with it and then other aspects of computers.

That era of discovery and expression was something special.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#302

Post by larusso »

Flash is the reason I’m a developer. I’m a self studies software developer. I wanted to become a screen designer in the early 2000 but also liked to bring the pages I designed to life. JavaScript for interactive content was impossible to use for me. I stumbled upon flash and was hooked. I started of with simple timeline animations, learned to structure and control the whole player from one script file. Learned basic OOP concepts and with AS3 the lot of OOP paradigms and patterns etc. I had a 3 year fun period with Flex and moved finally to mobile development. I never regretted to spend so much time on this now dead Technologie. I can still draw from my experience even when it comes to thinks “how not to do it”. I have to work Indirectly with Unity now. And it has it faults as well. I often joke that I preferred flash over it. There was only the Textfeld implementation to work around ;).

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#303

Post by jcelerier »

The_rationalist wrote: post #5
pippy wrote: post #4

Removing Flash from the web was done with good intentions. It was a propitiatory system plagued with security holes. Instead of replacing it with similarly capable open standards, we've got a propitiatory Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), flaky HTML5 calls that differ between browsers, and webassembly. It's a shame that HTML5 never really reached the ability of flash. And it's also a shame that Adobe didn't simply re…

What can flash do that modern browsers can't?

> What can flash do that modern browsers can't?

ensuring that the user sees the exact same thing on any browser / operating system combination ?

Just the font rendering differences between windows / mac make it impossible to create text that is supposed to fit perfectly in a given box because hinting differences may mean that you are a few pixels longer which can change the layout of a paragraph, etc...

with flash, there is only one single way things look across all platforms.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#304

Post by buboard »

dpau wrote: post #290
taneem wrote: post #251

During 1999-2000, I helped hundreds of people learn how to use Flash. I was, looking back now, probably one of the top experts on Flash 4 at the time in the world. The twist - I was a 15 year old living in a tiny African country called Lesotho. Lesotho is pretty isolated from the world. Nobody even knows it exists. Living there, Silicon Valley might as well be on Mars. However, we used to get issues of Wired Magazine…

thanks for sharing this wonderful story. it would make for a lovely short film.

In flash. but you have to hurry

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#305

Post by AndriyKunitsyn »

zamadatix wrote: post #13
pippy wrote: post #4

Removing Flash from the web was done with good intentions. It was a propitiatory system plagued with security holes. Instead of replacing it with similarly capable open standards, we've got a propitiatory Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), flaky HTML5 calls that differ between browsers, and webassembly. It's a shame that HTML5 never really reached the ability of flash. And it's also a shame that Adobe didn't simply re…

Is there really a way to do DRM that doesn't involve proprietary pieces somewhere along the way? I think the modern browser is technologically superior to what and how Flash did things (with the exception of native sockets, which is probably for the better). It's really everyone using Adobe's content creation tools (which were well integrated/designed) that made things so low friction. It took a long time for the bro…

>I think the modern browser is technologically superior to what and how Flash did things

Depends on what you mean by superior. There are still things Flash could do and modern “open web” can’t, determining keyboard state (caps lock state and current input language) is one example.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#306

Post by jakobegger »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #279
koreth1 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you'll never again be able to experience Fortnite as it was 24 hours ago - ever. Isn't that true of all one-time events, not just digital ones? I'll never be able to attend a Beatles concert or see "The Empire Strikes Back" on opening night or be celebrating on the streets of New York City on V-E Day.

It’s more that only a few years ago, the same experience could have been revisited - the technology and the means exist - but business reasons say otherwise. In this case, it’s the Fortnite world. If Fortnite were a game in the 1990s-2000s, the data (map, world, characters) would be on a CD or DVD and the multiplayer server would also be included on the CD: the community runs its own servers. If the developers releas…

Angry birds was such a disappointment... I bought it, thought it was a neat game, and well worth the $2.

A few years later I wanted to show it to my kids, and the game I bought had turned into an abomination of ads, in-app-purchases, and dark patterns, and there was no way to get back the charming little game that I originally bought...

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#307

Post by koonsolo »

fastball wrote: post #93
soup10 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Flash died with good intentions" is false. Flash died because it was the perfect tool for making mobile content, if not for the fact that it was sluggish on early iphone hardware. If Apple worked with Adobe to optimize flash for mobile, it would still be alive and well today. Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem, scapegoat performance and security for…

Flash performance was always terrible on all platforms. It span up the CPU on my windows computer from the beginning and never stopped until its eventual demise.

That is not performance, that is resource usage.

As a game developer who has programmed in ActionScript3, I can tell you that Flash was very performant for 2D graphics.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#308

Post by buboard »

zanny wrote: post #246
buboard wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity is not a particularly lightweight thing, and flash wasn't just for games. Its main use was animations / banners and video . > If you were to give people the same flash games now, they'd find them ridiculously lame. Some of the most popular social games are like farmville, or some poker games. those are really equivalent of flash

Unity also does animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8NeB10INDo But it gets really pedantic arguing the semantics of web flash - fundamentally it was only showing on a web page because you installed the browser plugin or it. Today browsers might have stopped supporting arbitrary library plugins like that but now you can write them in webassembly for the same ends. Its just that nobody has actually gone and don…

try to imagine a web page with 3 Unity banners

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#309

Post by xg15 »

nrb wrote: post #259
koreth1 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you'll never again be able to experience Fortnite as it was 24 hours ago - ever. Isn't that true of all one-time events, not just digital ones? I'll never be able to attend a Beatles concert or see "The Empire Strikes Back" on opening night or be celebrating on the streets of New York City on V-E Day.

Also, all of these gaming events are recorded for later viewing. I can experience Fortnite EXACTLY as it was when the event took place.

You can experience a recording of it (and even those may be taken down) but you cannot experience the game itself.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#310

Post by buboard »

theobeers wrote: post #50
The_rationalist wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can flash do that modern browsers can't?

Nothing, of course. Anything that could be done with Flash in its heyday can be done better (in several senses) with modern tools. But that’s not what we’re talking about, is it? We can ask what’s actually being done in web design these days… and who’s doing it. If you’re old enough to remember the period from the late ’90s to the mid aughts, think about your friends who were putting all kinds of wacky, creative page…

> can be done better (in several senses) with modern tools.

contestable. html5 games can be choppy in ways flash was not. even streaming video was pretty fast, comparing it to something like webrtc multi-party video. Hell even basic text-based chat like slack is a resource hog in html.

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