341–350 of 408 posts
Anyone knows of a modern browser that still supports flash? I'm stuck having to use old browsers, which I'm not very happy about. Ruffle doesn't work the for game that I play (Crystal Saga).
> Uploading achievements to Steam is a pain. You can't just define a list and give it to their command-line tools; you have to laboriously click through the slow, confusing miasma of PHP sadness that is the Steam partner site and add them one by one. > I think if you're a big important game studio you don't have to stand for that and they give you a bulk upload tool, but I'm not one of those so I looked at the HTTP c…
The bit about Apple Notarization is incorrect. You can do it with a free Apple Developer account. You only need to pay $99 if you want to distribute it through the App Store.
I still believe that Flash conceptually was a brilliant idea done terribly. It was slow, buggy, under developed functionality and a security nightmare. But the idea of having a single file that could bundle, code, audio, graphics that was dead easy to build and could run independent of specific browsers and operating systems. That is something magical. It is harder to build that kind of content today and near impossi…
> I still believe that Flash conceptually was a brilliant idea done terribly. It was slow, buggy, under developed functionality and a security nightmare.t Relative to what though? There was nothing else with its ubiquity, ease of use and deployment, and breadth of functionality. It pioneered and enabled so many things that we take for granted on the web today. Personally, as someone who used it extensively, I don't f…
Maybe I am just remembering it differently as this was more than a decade ago. But it seemed like almost every week, heck almost every day, another zero day would be discovered. Yes, this was the peak time of zero day exploits as every system was being hammered from all sides, but the Flash name came up far more often than anything else I recall expect for maybe general Windows Xp/7 issues.
As for performance, that was a major issue personally. I recall a time when I had nested items a few layers deep so that I could have a character with movable joints and the system was buckling under this work load. Going from fully ridged models running smooth as butter on 3DS Max to the same system crumbling under some basic vector graphics left a bad taste for me. It just always felt like it was dragging its feet compared with what these machine could achieve.
I don't recall any specific bugs only that recall the feeling of them. Sorry I am so light on specifics. A minor bug was that I do recall was as you rotated objects, there must have been a small rounding issue that meant items would slowly shrink as you rotated them multiple times while going about your process. It would take hundreds of such movements before it became noticeable, it was a funny little thing but would lead to some projects becoming a bit frustrating.
I say this as someone who absolutely loved Flash. I wish it had kept on going regardless of those issues. It just felt like it needed a Windows Vista to Windows 7 moment. Where it was taken to task and team got behind it to refine the project into something much more lean that still had the same functionality. Instead it felt like it was treated as that thing that would get barely any attention until it died from atrophy. That mobile wasn't taken to task is probably the thing that ended up killing it quick.
As someone else said here, Flash felt like a vision of the future. Where computers were tools of creation made easy not just consumption.
It was a pioneer in so many things and I wish it was still a part of the web. It made interactive media distribution so dang easy! Build it in Flash, add a single line of HTML and BOOM - multi-platform audio visual experience that could scale like a champ!
Yeah video kind of sucked, early Youtube performance a good example in that as it would bring my G4 Mini to it's knees! But for everything else it was such a visionary idea that we have lost.
On a tangent.
This is something that I feel a lot of modern technology has forgotten. That vision of not just new tech but tech that is enabling to even those that have no interest on the base technology. Flash had that vision, not just of creation but the ease in which it could be spread. Hypercard had that vision. Heck BASIC had that vision. As Steve Jobs always pushed in the early 80's, the computer is a cycle for the mind. Nowadays at times it can feel like the sedation of the mind.
Everytime I see here on HN another link about thing Ruby, GCC, CLANG, some JS framework, Tensor... something - I get it, in those fields it is all very cool and useful. But it is also very much for those that work in the weeds. Great for those that do that, but it also feels so lacking of that "Wow!" factor that I think brought a lot of us into this field. I hope we rediscover that one day and soon.
I still believe that Flash conceptually was a brilliant idea done terribly. It was slow, buggy, under developed functionality and a security nightmare. But the idea of having a single file that could bundle, code, audio, graphics that was dead easy to build and could run independent of specific browsers and operating systems. That is something magical. It is harder to build that kind of content today and near impossi…
I'm not offering an assessment of the overall sentiment, but it's been a very long time since I've had to think twice about browser interoperability, and it would be an exceedingly rare occurrence for a browser update to cause me any problem.
I still believe that Flash conceptually was a brilliant idea done terribly. It was slow, buggy, under developed functionality and a security nightmare. But the idea of having a single file that could bundle, code, audio, graphics that was dead easy to build and could run independent of specific browsers and operating systems. That is something magical. It is harder to build that kind of content today and near impossi…
I think was flash did well was its neat component based framework. It was easy to understand, easy to modify and build your own set of controls on top of it. The runtime engine sucked. It was too slow and therefor power demanding. But the framework itself was much better than todays android , react and others.
There were some projects when I was running on a G3 iMac where I would drop the render screen down really small to see how it would perform on a more powerful machine. It felt like if they even managed to get decent GPU acceleration possible then they could have solved a lot of these issues.
I still believe that Flash conceptually was a brilliant idea done terribly. It was slow, buggy, under developed functionality and a security nightmare. But the idea of having a single file that could bundle, code, audio, graphics that was dead easy to build and could run independent of specific browsers and operating systems. That is something magical. It is harder to build that kind of content today and near impossi…
Flash really was that easy for so many people. Why isn’t there a true replacement?
The technical legacy of Flash made it a poor fit for touch screens. Apps filled that void with astounding speed.
This part is just a vague opinion I am riffing with - With mass available video, a ocean of video content may have changed tastes enough that the demand for interactive content diminished somewhat. Social media also killed of the dedicated website for a lot of places that used this technology and thus the demand for this stuff.
Once Google via Chrome closed the Flash hole, I do wonder if they will ever let anyone else to try and get in on that space? Time will tell.
Hey HN, I haven't done a lot of technical postmortem blogpost-style writing so I'd welcome any feedback or tips on how to improve. Is it too long, too short, too technical, not technical enough? Boring? Interesting? Is it enlightening or does it just come off like content marketing? I literally have no idea how good I am at this.
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"but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent" THIS. I am so sick of the competition in most tech jobs / companies to climb the stupid ladder. Everyone just wants more more more and our society reinforces that. I _REALLY_ miss working on teams that didn't have that amount of competition causing mild dysfunction.
Just for some perspective, the 40-hour work week is a relatively new invention that only surfaced with the recent rise of the white-collar workforce. In my parents' day, the 40-hour work week was called "bankers hours" and this was used in a highly derogatory "sure must be nice" tone of voice. Many or most of us are probably descended from farmers that worked doing hard physical labor from sun-up to sun-down six days…
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The problem is that the approach itself is kinda flawed. The moment you have to support high-DPI or translate the app to a different language (with text labels of different size), that whole trick of just WYSIWYG dragging and dropping widgets in a visual designer breaks down.
HiDPI isn't a problem but variable (dynamic) size is.