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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

#331

Post by amrox »

jakobegger wrote: post #306
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I had the same experience showing my daughter Cut the Rope.

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

#333

Post by cryptozeus »

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…

Great story, all that isolation from Silicon Valley probably helped you focus on your craft and didn’t provide distractions.

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

#334

Post by Mindwipe »

joshtynjala wrote: post #170
Paperweight wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...yeah there's no way the creatives we're talking about are gonna use that. There must _not_ be any command line or scripting involved for most of the population to be able to use it. But why reinvent the wheel? I think that the key to Flash's success is in its roots as an excellent, intuitive vector graphics editor called SmartSketch. (Way easier to use than Inkscape, IMO) They added animation to compete with Macro…

Adobe Flash Player, the web browser plugin, will no longer be updated in 2020. The Flash IDE, now called Animate, continues to be developed by Adobe. They have not announced an end of life for this tool. It will still be updated after 2020. In fact, it can now export a variety of new formats other than SWF files for Flash Player, and they've been expanding the animation features quite a bit in recent years. It's unfo…

> So many people in this thread are lamenting that this user friendly animation tool no longer exists as a starting point for new users, when in fact, it does and will still be in active development beyond 2020.

Animate really isn't as simple to use as Flash is, and bluntly in the modern Era the CC suite is too expensive to get those young users.

I wonder if Affinity will have a go at this in the long run.

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

#335

Post by robotbikes »

amrox wrote: post #331
jakobegger wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I had the same experience showing my daughter Cut the Rope.

Wow, yeah so many dark patterns in kids games, lots of games that look cool and then you install them and have to watch a half minute ad for another video game every time you die. I remember renting NES games over the weekends and so I had to choose between a limited number of choices. The seemingly infinite number of games that exist now via the android play store is crazy but most of them are completely bad and would never get approved from any curatorial perspective yet they make money for the platform and the developer (evidently).

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

#336

Post by joeberon »

heavyset_go wrote: post #167
dTal wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just young people. As in other creative arts, if the tooling is over-complex or high-friction it can simply kill the creative flow. We should aim to make things pleasant to use for experts as well as beginners. There is a great deal of philosophical resistance to this idea hiding just under the surface, driven perhaps by a sense that difficult interfaces are a test of worthiness. Consider the barrier to entry to…

Of all of the areas where there is legitimate gatekeeping, like with the AMA and residency limits, software is one of the worst examples you could have picked. Software is one of those spaces where there is an incredible amount of capital invested in making things easy for the lowest common denominator. There are so many resources for people of any age and background to learn practical skills in this field. There are…

>Software is one of those spaces where there is an incredible amount of capital invested in making things easy for the lowest common denominator.

This is true for _education_, however the design of the tooling itself, as well as the purely code-based interface with which we like to rely on (no WYSIWYG or visual creative tools) is what makes it creatively difficult

Compare the experience of making some HTML5 canvas game to making a song in modern day DAWs. In the latter there has been so much investment into improving the workflow and the quality of the software to make the creative experience smoother. In programming, almost no effort is put into the creative experience, outside of niche fantasy terminals (e.g. PICO-8)

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

#338

Post by angry_octet »

watwut wrote: post #299
big_chungus wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly. Such camps certainly exist, but they're not for everyone. I was tinkering with Linux at 7, but only because I had a technical parent who put it on the family computer. I'd say the important part here was that I wasn't given a coding bootcamp course to go through, I just got to play. Eventually, I figured out how to use single-user to re-set the root password and play as much supertux as I wanted. This pr…

I agree. But: > The first is the sort who enjoys it for what it is. Shaves yaks configuring his system, tries out new languages for the heck of it, that sort. The second has a perfectly respectable career in software, and enjoys other things when he comes home at five p.m. I have found out that these are not in opposition at all. In fact, workplace that holds you in 80 hours a week largely prevents trying out new tec…

You're misinterpreting the OP, he's saying that some people do non computer things after 5, not that they work 80 hour weeks. And it's not really the time spent, it's the intellectual approach to computing, where tinkering is an end in itself, vs a more transactional approach.

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

#339

Post by bbayer »

jayd16 wrote: post #77

People are looking back with rose tinted glasses, I think. This was an era where you could build rich media with absolute canvas values and it would look great and it was easy for an artist to take that canvas and do things. The iPhone killed flash but not just in the obvious way. These days everything needs to be reactive and run on well on mobile hardware. Even if iOS supported flash it would need to be a different…

Adobe Air could produce executables iOS and many other operating systems and environments. I have seen many successful mobile games done with Air. Flash Player is a virtual machine and swf is compiled bytecode. It could be ported to any hardware and OS. Death of Flash is not technical, it is political. SWF format and Flash Player is proprietary. They chose to kill it instead of supporting someone else's technology.

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

#340

Post by somishere »

pault wrote: post #166
blueboo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposite is the case, actually. It's far easier than ever to make animations and write software. I would contend Flash was a miserable developer tool, a near feature-free IDE, and rather than "balance", it took a kitchen sink approach to letting you put any kind of code anywhere...in an object, on the document, in a UI event of a button, on a frame. Meanwhile, there are quite a few flash-likes for HTML5, and many…

What you describe as miserable was my introduction to software development. I never had any technically minded friends or family, and growing up I looked at programming the same way I looked at professional sports; out of my reach and not worth attempting. I started my career as a graphic designer and flash became popular a few years after I started working. The ability to "put code anywhere" allowed me to experiment…

Yes! My entry point as well, back in the Macromedia days, making interactive animations with gotoAndStop. When AS3 appeared many years later weaned myself into the concepts of OOP, partly out of need, partly out of curiousity ... but mainly to understand other's work. Looking up to guys like mr doob. Frontend tooling today is insane. The flash ide and actionscript felt like a standard at the time, with a huge amount of power abstracted away. I feel like it's only in the past 5 years that the real standards have caught up with the (admiteddly inaccessible) possibilities of pre-2008.
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