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Internet Archive expands Flash support

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Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#71

Post by irrational »

CSMastermind wrote: post #16

I was just watching a YouTube video about Home Star Runner yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about it. In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be watched passively but also could incorporate…

Flash really was something special. We created all kinds of training content in it (all of which was completely replaced with static text and images after all of our customers adopted iPads for doing associate training - Which where it still is today, extremely boring). We all these animated characters, with their own backstories and personalities, that each had their own professional voice talent. Associates in Asia especially loved them. Another project was for people who repaired printers. All the printers this company produced were 3d models inside of flash that could be rotated on any access and disassembled to the smallest screw. A tech could choose something to repair and it would show them step by step how to do the repair. They could rotate/zoom the printer however they wanted to see the current step playing out. Neither video nor static text/images are a good replacement.

The best thing was, everything was vector graphics, so the file sizes were minuscule.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#73

Post by kmeisthax »

lucgommans wrote: post #22
Apocryphon wrote: post #20

Does this mean that previously archived sites that use Flash will now be viewable?

That would be nice. I was recently trying to play https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/scie... via archive.org, but it doesn't work. Also the swf file itself does not load in an old virtual machine. I don't know where to view error output besides the JavaScript console; it simply does nothing. (Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2290936 ) I still occasionally think back to th…

Ruffle ships a browser extension that loads Ruffle into every tab you open, so Flash sites work as they were originally intended to. It's available for Chrome and Firefox. Safari works if you enable developer extensions and download our macOS app - we have to get into Mac App Store for it to work normally because apparently notarization isn't enough[0].

https://ruffle.rs/#downloads

[0] It was enough for the old extensions API :/

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#74

Post by ftmch »

LadyMartel wrote: post #65
jonplackett wrote: post #59

The thing I still miss about Flash is the authoring tool. It is one of the few bits of software that bridged a gap between artists and creators and coding in a way that totally democratised creating interactive websites. I see some similarities with Instagram filters and TikTok effects. The visual-layout-you-can-add-code-to approach, but Flash was so mainstream and capable in a way filters aren’t. I wish Adobe had do…

I fondly remember when I first discovered how to attach a goto action to a button and I went nuts with it making choose your own adventure type animations. Drawing was also really easy to make thing look decent even with a mouse. I haven't found (or admittedly looked for) a similar vector drawing tool like that ever since.

Yes, the generated brush strokes were really good. I was at one point just making static comics in Flash, using just a mouse because the brush strokes looked like they were drawn by someone way more skilled than myself.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#75

Post by cubefox »

kmeisthax wrote: post #67
Bakingpotato wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

adobe was the death of flash. Macromedia had a better handle on it, and when adobe bought it, then ran it into the floor and gave up early, leaving it to rot. I don't think they could even open source it, with all the other companies' copyright work they shoved into it, like dolby

The problem was that Flash Player needed significant rewrites and Adobe didn't want to pay for them. Or at least, not without finding a way to get more money out of game developers for the privilege. The story starts with Adobe. They proudly announce AS4, along with an "FP Next" intended to run it. Then they also mention new revshare rules mandated on anyone cross-compiling 3D game engines to Flash Player. This is sp…

I don't quite get why the Flash plugins were do slow on mobile. On Windows desktop, Flash was much faster than other NPAPI plugins. Most other plugins froze the whole browser for a second or so (Java even longer), while Flash didn't do that. And at the time, early native "HTML5 replacements" for Flash ads/games were actually slower than Flash.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#77

Post by jdjdjdhhd »

haunter wrote: post #4

Highly recommend "Winnie the Pooh's Home Run Derby". It's the Dark Souls of flash games https://archive.org/details/homerunderby_en The japanese version is here (no difference) https://archive.org/details/homerun_20201126 They might crash in full screen though (some kind of bug)

Indeed, it crashed Firefox mobile for me in full screen

But either way, I played twice and that's enough for me

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#78

Post by dylan604 »

CSMastermind wrote: post #16

I was just watching a YouTube video about Home Star Runner yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about it. In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be watched passively but also could incorporate…

>He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story.

Oh, how little credit you give to the magic of editing. If they needed the same footage to be reusable with minor differences in things like hair color, they could do it all in post. With the magic of m3u8 play lists, they could see where they even have the variations of videos to as minimum duplication of video as possible. It becomes much more of an asset management nightmare than content creation issue. As an aside, theatrical releases of movies were sometimes given "fingerprints" where small details in a scene would be changed like the adding/removing of a prop in the background, the color scheme of the books/towels/whatever in the background, etc. They didn't film all of those variations. They were modified in post.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#79

Post by weard_beard »

nolok wrote: post #68
themagician wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping f…

> I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Same way pdf does, because the money was in the authoring tools and they had the best ones around. But adobe mostly inherited flash because they wanted the death of macromedia, so they didn't really care about it.

cough coughMagentocough cough

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#80

Post by lucgommans »

kmeisthax wrote: post #73
lucgommans wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be nice. I was recently trying to play https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/scie... via archive.org, but it doesn't work. Also the swf file itself does not load in an old virtual machine. I don't know where to view error output besides the JavaScript console; it simply does nothing. (Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2290936 ) I still occasionally think back to th…

Ruffle ships a browser extension that loads Ruffle into every tab you open, so Flash sites work as they were originally intended to. It's available for Chrome and Firefox. Safari works if you enable developer extensions and download our macOS app - we have to get into Mac App Store for it to work normally because apparently notarization isn't enough[0]. https://ruffle.rs/#downloads [0] It was enough for the old exten…

Did that work on the NYT site for you? Because for me it doesn't seem to, but then I figure you're just replying in general and not about this rock-paper-scissors AI
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