Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era • Hacker News Board

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

#391

Post by ChikkaChiChi » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 4:18 PM UTC

koreth1 wrote: post #252

mntmoss wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the essential thing about this era is a gradual cultural rediscovery of ownership. We've just been through a very lengthy race to the bottom for all sorts of information - pretty much anything ephemeral and disposable is free or extremely cheap, and then heavily locked down to protect property rights. And it's built a kind of event horizon to culture where all the things pressed up closest to the digital univ…

> 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.

The same could have been said about World of Warcraft, but here we are with WoW Classic.

Digital experiences can be recreated, especially if motivated by profit. What won't be created are some of those moments that were unforeseen consequences (e.g. the Seed of Corruption exploit in WoW)

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

#392

Post by smt88 » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 4:26 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #316

smt88 wrote: post #201

It is very, very silly to suggest the Flash era was more creative than the YouTube/indie-game era. In general, the Web is more commercialized now, so creative content doesn't always rise to the top, and there are incentives to be a low-quality content factory. But there are thousands or millions of online videos (some, like Flash, are animated) and indie games on major platforms that are just as creative as the most…

youtube and indie games literally started as flash

What does that have to do with my comment?

Flash was a platform for games and video. Now we have much, much larger platforms with more contributors and more consumers. There's likely more than one order of magnitude more content being produced now than 15 years ago.

It's possible that the average level of creativity has gone down, but the amount of highly creative output has surely gone way, way up.

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

#393

Post by jeegsy » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 4:36 PM UTC

sitkack wrote: post #239

ojbyrne wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sympathetic to your sentiment, but the reason for the disdain is Professionalization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professionalization It's natural to want your job not to be turned over to the CEO's 14 year old son.

This has not occurred and is not occurring in programming. The CEOs 14 year old son is a straw boy.

> The CEOs 14 year old son is a straw boy.

Tee Hee

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

#394

Post by pixelbath » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 4:47 PM UTC

daleharvey wrote: post #363

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…

Curious and feel free to ignore, what was your screenname on the yahoo web design chat rooms? I also hung around there a lot around that time using one of those embarrassing screennames made by teens and their favourite songs (renegade_master) I was one of the people constantly wishing flash would die. Although I am happy the open web won that battle, I was always hoping and am sad that nothing based on open standard…

Lol, hey renegade_master_uk! I was ashido (and various permutations of that name) in those rooms. I jumped ship from server-side to go work on Flash applications in the early 2000s, then back to JS near Flash 9/10 (when the writing was on the wall), then back again to server-side.

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

#395

Post by davidwitt415 » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

ken wrote: post #90

djsumdog wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash died because of Apple, and before Adboe bought Macromedia, it was an incredibly small runtime; way better than Java at very specific forms of 3D rendering. Old Flash can be upscaled to 4k. A youtube video is pre-rendered and stuck at that resolution forever.

I hear this a lot, but where was the Android or BlackBerry or Windows phone that ran Flash acceptably fast, and without weekly security holes? Mobile killed Flash. It was a poorly implemented technology which was acceptable only during the era where electric power was unlimited, and people were in the habit of frequent reboots to update their OS anyway.

Windows CE and Ipaq. I created mobile tour apps for museums like the Louvre, LA County Museum, SFMOMA and the Whitney that successfully served tens of thousands of people daily in the mid/late 2000s.

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

#396

Post by redisman » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 5:36 PM UTC

bbanyc wrote: post #254

redisman wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash had a VM that truly was "write once, run on anything" and a great (software) pixel and vector renderer. Cross-browser compatibility with HTML standards was completely bonkers and HTML had none of the features Flash Games and Animations needed. Try to move or rotate a picture at 30 fps with old HTML.

I remember Flash being slow and buggy on Mac and Linux at the time, and updates lagged far behind the Windows version (on Linux in particular). And then I saw an article from a Macromedia/Adobe dev saying that it was heavily optimized x86 assembly code targeted towards Windows and very difficult to port to other platforms... given the IE6 monoculture at the time, it made sense, but I felt like a redheaded stepchild f…

Definitely true. Most game engines still have poor Linux (and often Mac) support.

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

#397

Post by smush » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 5:38 PM UTC

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #194

Does anyone here remember an old DOS program called Cartooners [1]? It let you do animated shorts with predefined characters, different backgrounds, music, speech bubbles, etc. I used to love playing around with that as a teenager. I found the workflow ingenious: You placed a character on the screen, selected what action you wanted it to perform (like ‘Walk’), I think you selected how you wanted it to move, then you…

The scrubbing features remind me of Microsoft 3D movie maker which was a Win 95-era product that had the same easy approach, but with 3d characters.

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

#398

Post by smush » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 5:46 PM UTC

ArtixKrieger wrote: post #268

Flash was my favorite game design tool of all time, and it changed my life. In 2002 I created the original AdventureQuest. Because the game was created in Flash (Actionscript 1) it was instantly cross platform. It could dynamically load any number of animated monsters, weapons, cut-scenes, towns, and backgrounds. Most importantly, those loaded items could have their own code which let them do anything-- giving them n…

Man - DragonFable & MechQuest were great fun. I still think of Sir Valence and the various knights with punny names!

I hope between godot, procreate 5, and open source flash runners, long term Flash will be properly succeeded; for now it appears we have regressed unless you pay Adobe for a CC subscription.

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

#399

Post by gmiller123456 » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

nojvek wrote: post #274

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…

Adobe did open the swf spec in later versions. Swf was compressed bytecode. Still a lot more efficient than the way we send js. https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/swf-fil... There were a number of tools that compiled to swf. It sucks that Adobe never opened the Flash Player. That was it’s death nail. They had little to gain from it. It was free. The money maker was Flash Studio and other Macromedia…

My bet would be the real money maker was all the spyware included with the Flash installer.

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

#400

Post by mthoms » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 6:10 PM UTC

soup10 wrote: post #330

mthoms wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be doing a little re-writing of history yourself right here: > Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem, scapegoat performance and security for the ban, and gain a competitive advantage at the same time Steve Jobs never even envisioned the App Store model when he decided against supporting Flash in Safari. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App…

I'm referring to were jobs went on a 1600 word rant about flash while not once mentioning the shortcomings of his own objective-c authoring environments and the many good things about flash that lead to the enormous community it had. https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ This combined with updated app review guidelines banning flash on iOS accelerated the adoption of html5. Afterthought or not, apps quickl…

You accused someone of "trying to rewrite history", when what they said was factually correct.

It's also been established that Apple tried to work with Adobe on addressing the issues it saw with Flash but was rebuffed.

The issue of Apple forbidding non-native code is one I disagreed with but has many layers and complexities. It's not nearly as simple as your implication that Jobs seemingly woke up one day and decided to kill Flash for no good reason.

> rant about flash while not once mentioning the shortcomings of his own objective-c authoring environments and the many good things about flash that lead to the enormous community it had

I'm just going to re-phrase what the poster above said - Why is it on Apple to evangelize Adobe's software (and criticize it's own)? That just doesn't make any sense.