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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

#411

Post by albertsondev »

mr_toad wrote: post #231
aidenn0 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS Excel also lets you put any kind of code anywhere. IMO, nNot forcing any organization lowers the barrier to entry.

> Not forcing any organization lowers the barrier to entry. And raises the barrier to maintenance.

Maintenance doesn't really matter when you're trying to just get into something as a novice and voraciously create.

A larval developer's gateway project is all but guaranteed to end up as an incomprehensible mess of spaghetti that'll fall to pieces at the lightest touch after a summer of plugging away at it, but that's not what's important. What's important is that they could make something -- something real. By the time it's left as a shambling pile of kluges and bad practices that'll never see the light of day again, it's still gotten far enough to inspire something, and serves as a great point to move on to greater ambitions -- or even start from scratch with one's lessons learned and make it better, perhaps with a more advanced toolset that now seems infinitely more approachable than it did at the beginning.

This isn't a discussion about tools to create software that'll be refined, depended on, and passed on to new developers over the span of years. It's about bridging the gap between restrictive toys and actual non-trivial projects for novices to tinker with.

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

#412

Post by mthoms »

soup10 wrote: post #408
mthoms wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Why is it on Apple to make honest evaluations of Flash? It makes a lot of sense if the primary goal is to make good technology and software. Is that seriously so hard to understand?

In case you missed it, he was discussing Flash in the context of a mobile device. There is simply nothing positive to say about it. Nothing.

Everything he did mention, from power consumption to terrible security and poor usability has since been proven true. I don't know of a single reputable technologist, or tech journalist, who would dispute that. Do you?

Here's a write up of why Flash failed on Android. Notice any familiar themes?

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/134551-why-flash-faile...

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

#413

Post by Sendotsh »

apineda wrote: post #380
Sendotsh wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game Maker is hugely underrated and often dismissed because of its name. It’s an incredibly powerful and easy to use game/interactive-app maker that can export packaged programs to Windows, OSX, Linux, and HTML5, then with additional licensing/fees to game consoles. It has a drag-and-drop mode for absolute beginners that can let someone with zero experience be creating simple games in their first weekend playing with…

Did you publish those stories? Would love to have a look!

No sorry, I mostly make small games/interactive-stories/educational-things for my own kids. None of them have really been publish worthy yet.

I do hope to start publishing some children's games and educational interactive stories one day though, I just need to find an artist (or practice more myself).

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

#414

Post by big_chungus »

wiseleo wrote: post #410
anon9001 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had similar experiences to you and definitely fit into the yak-shaving variety (or at least I did before work destroyed my soul). There's no question to me that early exposure and encouragement makes all the difference in educating kids. I can't understand why we're not engineering experiences in all these different fields for kids to build real stuff that can eventually turn into a trade. If you're a kid, even tod…

There is a way to start children young to become lawyers and doctors. Lawyers need perfect English. Doctors need perfect English and biology. Our entire school system is wrong. :) I am working on it. We force parents to go to school and that is wrong. The key to rapid education is teaching the correct subjects. All science is functionally math. Physics is math and chemistry is math. Music is math. All written homewor…

There's _at least_ one more critical component you're missing, logic and analysis. It will also be harder to keep a pupil's attention on two subjects for half a day than on a multitude of subjects for forty-five minutes apiece. After three hours being lectured on the same subject, I would get tired even in college; how do you plan to force eight-year-olds to pay attention in such a manner?

In other words, you cannot swap all time for study of english and mathematics and expect to simply achieve twice as much in english and mathematics.

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

#415

Post by soup10 »

mthoms wrote: post #412
soup10 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why is it on Apple to make honest evaluations of Flash? It makes a lot of sense if the primary goal is to make good technology and software. Is that seriously so hard to understand?

In case you missed it, he was discussing Flash in the context of a mobile device . There is simply nothing positive to say about it. Nothing. Everything he did mention, from power consumption to terrible security and poor usability has since been proven true. I don't know of a single reputable technologist, or tech journalist, who would dispute that. Do you? Here's a write up of why Flash failed on Android. Notice an…

I can tell you've never used the flash authoring tool or you wouldn't be making snarky remarks about this. Nobody is disputing that the runtime had problems and it was never good enough for prime-time on mobile on older devices. But a blanket ban on Flash was anti-competitive behavior that means Adobe never got the chance to prove it could work.

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

#416

Post by woutr_be »

hunterloftis wrote: post #291
woutr_be wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, and it feels very similar to what we have in Vue/React these days. How are you liking Web Components?

I've enjoyed Web Components; using LitElement (a WC subclass) feels like writing React with native browser APIs. Working with the browser instead of hacking around it.

Good to hear, I was thinking about using Vue for a new project, but now decided to give Web Components (LitElement) a try. I didn't really need all the SPA functionality anyway, just wanted small and fast components.

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

#417

Post by wiseleo »

big_chungus wrote: post #414
wiseleo wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a way to start children young to become lawyers and doctors. Lawyers need perfect English. Doctors need perfect English and biology. Our entire school system is wrong. :) I am working on it. We force parents to go to school and that is wrong. The key to rapid education is teaching the correct subjects. All science is functionally math. Physics is math and chemistry is math. Music is math. All written homewor…

There's _at least_ one more critical component you're missing, logic and analysis. It will also be harder to keep a pupil's attention on two subjects for half a day than on a multitude of subjects for forty-five minutes apiece. After three hours being lectured on the same subject, I would get tired even in college; how do you plan to force eight-year-olds to pay attention in such a manner? In other words, you cannot…

That's not the plan. The plan is to give them a reason to want to learn.

Learning 45 minutes at a time is silly. It's far more effective to master one concept at a time.

Logic comes with math. I haven't fully thought it through, but my initial goal is to eliminate the need to rely on parents to do well in school.

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

#418

Post by h1d »

mattkevan wrote: post #94
scarface74 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Adobe claimed that Apple was stopping them from supporting Flash on the original iPhone. When Adobe did finally get Flash (barely) running on Android. It required 1GB of RAM and 1Ghz CPU. The original iPhone had a 400Mhz CPU and 128Mb of RAM. Adobe was late shipping Flash for the Motorola Xoom. Motorola touted being able to use Flash as a feature over the iPad. Leaving it in the unfortunate situation that you c…

Yeah, it wasn’t Apple that killed Flash, it was Adobe. It died the moment Adobe bought Macromedia. Just think, if Adobe hadn’t bungled Flash or prematurely killed off Fireworks, they could be owning the modern digital design space right now, rather than desperately trying to catch up to Figma and Sketch with XD.

And slowing down the entire design space because of closed PSD format driving out competitions and Photoshop is so slow compared to apps like Affinity Photo as its legacy code must be in the way to employ any radical improvements.

Someone needs to take over this space.

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

#419

Post by mikorym »

antonvs wrote: post #325
mikorym wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was there a "computing hotspot" where you were at the time? I think with all the school issues (and university issues) in South Africa it would be cool to have sort of (physical) computing libraries with Raspberry Pis or something like that–a sort of enabling environment where independent kids would at least have the resources necessary to build an eventual career for themselves (perhaps unwittingly at first).

Just a nit, (the Kingdom of) Lesotho is a separate country from South Africa, although it's landlocked by South Africa.

I am South African so yes, I don't have any imperial ambitions in that regard. But having said that, Lesotho is rather dependant on South Africa (as OP hints). My question was really whether he was an outlier or whether his friends or immediate environment had a lot of (aspiring) coders.

In Southern Africa in general there was probably < 5% internet penetration back then.

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

#420

Post by Riverheart »

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…

Thanks for the great games! Remember playing AQ Original many moons ago. Hard to believe how much time has passed.

Edit: Out of curiosity, did you ever evaluate OpenFL/Haxe as a migration path?

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