Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
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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 new AI, features, or letting there be a game within the game. Also, it was easy to communicate with the database through posts to webpages. Because of this, your character was persistent and the game was able to update with new things every week. (In fact, the game has been updating for 17 years and is STILL updated with new things every single week.)
As Flash evolved, we built more games: DragonFable, MechQuest, and a slew of minigames. Actionscript 2 has a special place in my heart. It was my favorite language. Not being a "real programmer", it was really easy to use. Making things was ultra fast. Actionscript 3 was a challenge for me. our "real programmers" loved it. But, it was so hard for me to actually make anything happen with it. When it became the new standard and we started developing with it, I stopped programming and focused on the content assembly side.
We have built several Flash Massively Multiplayer Video games: AdventureQuest Worlds, EpicDuel, Oversoul, and HeroSmash. They all benefited from the same features that the very first game did, allowing for weekly (or more often) releases of new content. The games literally grew under your feet as you played them.
Creating art, animation, and interactivity in Flash was the best. Flash 3.0 was probably my favorite version. Flash CS6 being a close second.
We are currently in the process of converting our most popular game, AdventureQuest Worlds to Unity. Switching from vector to raster is a nightmare-- ask anyone who has gone through converting 10,000 items with no universal conformity.
Flash was just so fast and easy. We still use Adobe Animate (which is what they call the Flash tool now) for creating 2D vector art. But I really do miss Flash as a "one stop shop" tool to create... anything.
Battle on! Artix
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.
Edit: Out of curiosity, did you ever evaluate OpenFL/Haxe as a migration path?
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 from South Africa, and these came with shareware CDs. These CDs included 30-day trial editions of Macromedia Flash.
Flash was amazing at the time. Being able to create interactive animations blew my mind. I learned Flash 4 completely inside and out. I knew every single feature, every single quirk.
Of course living in Lesotho, there was nothing I could really do with all this. Most people around me didn't even know how to use computers. Flash was several layers of abstraction away from that.
So I used to spend all my time on Yahoo Chat's Web Design chat rooms. Mainly hanging out with nerds in the US. We used to have countless people drop by in the rooms every day asking questions about Flash. Mainly people working for web design agencies in the US. I was the resident Flash expert. Flash questions always were referred to me.
In the 2000s Flash rightly got a lot of flak. I'm not sad it's gone. But it was really something special, especially in the late 90s.
It was just the right mix of relative simplicity and power.
No wonder that all the creatives flocked to flash.
That era of discovery and expression was something special.
AS3 is actually quite a pleasant language to work in, and while I'm glad that I don't need to muck with Flash plugins anymore, I do miss how easy it was to get something built when I was just bored and wanted to make a new toy.
For me, nothing has really come along to replace Flash in regards to the "tangible" feelings you get. JS and WebGL and Canvas and whatnot are great, and definitely lead to better results in regards to the user experience, but I feel that they're a lot harder to "pick up and play".
Also, it was really easy to reverse engineer a flash file. One could just import the .fla file into flash and see a lot of stuff that was going behind the scene - assets and action scripts were easily available to explore. This was my favourite way to get better at flash; I would go to templatemonster.com and browse through all the cool flash websites they had, then navigate to the temp folder of IE and then copy paste all the .fla files into my own personal folder for later dissection.
Making a dance video to Monty Python's "Camelot" song is what made me learn about sprite sheets and motion techniques. It encouraged me to start googling different camera angles to figure out how to frame my shots.
That's why I love seeing kids playing with Minecraft, as it contains many of the same elements that I was playing with when I was a kid. Now if we could only get them into Dwarf Fortress, THEN we'd be talking. :) Speaking of which, that steam launch is supposed to be soon.
In Southern Africa in general there was probably < 5% internet penetration back then.
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 standards came to replace it.
The older ones are fully self contained games, some of which are amazing, in a single swf file that works in all major operating systems (The newer ones started side loading data from servers though.)
I hope there will always remain ways to play those.
What people don’t often realize with flash was that the output was a file. Tiled is taking a similar approach in that we are “documentizing” interactive experiences. We call the output a microapp (think .swf) and these can be experienced as an embedded experience (both native and browser-based), offline/online, through their app or other platforms.
Since then I've done a lot of video editing with different tools, but I still think back to Macromedia Flash and how I, a child with no ability to code and no knowledge of HTML or Web tech, was able to make my imagination come to life on the screen.
I believe it's that powerful experience for novices that we're missing. I'm not sure how we should get it back.
(edit: phrasing)
Also, low or no-cost applications that are accessible to newcomers include Blender and the upcoming Procreate 5.
Lots of animators are still making indy animation, it's just been drowned out on the major platforms due to how time consuming it is to create and it's basically not possible to monetize well outside of Anim8 now (YouTube algorithm favors frequent uploads and high video duration - not compatible with animation).
However, I'm a little disappointed that it seems to output in MP4. Is there really no modern format for vector video?
I think you have deftly described a bigger problem, as the whole industry gets more and more sophisticated and complex. The barrier for entry is so high now that I think it stifles young people's interest too quickly.
The great thing about Flash was the developer tool. Part animation studio, part simple programming IDE. It was a great balance.
Maybe there is a place in the market for framework to implement a flash-a-like in a HTML5 Canvas?
And ruffle-rs[2] is a reimplemenation of the flash player itself in Rust. (So you'd still be using ActionScript for authoring)
[1]https://www.openfl.org/ [2]https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle
The first beginner tutorial is about displaying a bitmap and starts with a terminal [1]. This is not as discoverable as Flash’s tools, which felt more like MS Paint when first opened.
[1] https://www.openfl.org/learn/haxelib/tutorials/displaying-a-...
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 Macromedia Shockwave in 1995, and the rest is the well known history of corporate greed and a victim of its own success.
The Flash IDE is still around, however (https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html), but Adobe's giving it up at the end of 2020 :( I can only hope that they open source it.
A light, friendly version is Flash 5. It's available online (http://www.oldversion.com/windows/macromedia-flash-5-0), weighs in at a whopping 18 MB, and still works on Windows 10!
Anyway, Flash 5 Player .swf files can be exported as standalone .exe "Projectors". For example, the IDE tutorial one (https://www.sharhon.com/files/flash5test.exe) stands at 405 KB and still runs on Windows 10 as well. Surely it would be possible to wrap _real_ Flash projectors in a WebAssembly Windows NT emulator using a drag-and-drop webpage...and let the games begin.
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 unfortunate that many people are confused about what exactly Adobe has discontinued. 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.
(AS1 is gone too, it was something you had to write by selecting verbs in a massive dropdown, and good riddance to that.)
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.
There is a workflow you can use with a custom Adobe Animate plugin that lets you use Adobe Animate as your authoring tool.
...perhaps you mean the countless drag-and-drop code-free frameworks that enable people to create apps without writing code? Or that a basic Swift tutorial to do just that takes about 15 minutes, including downloading Xcode? I just can't understand this confused nostalgia.
90% of apps can be replicated as web pages, which are far, far easier to program and deploy. Frameworks do add a lot needless of complexity for little benefit. The reason is not a "test of worthiness" though - the purpose is developer lock-in and make it as much difficult as possible to switch to the competing platform. The only way to win this game is not to play
Although when people start arguing that programming a web page is easy, it really brings home how awful modern programming is, and how long it has been since there was widespread usage of really decent and simple RAD tooling.
Or if one shells out to Delphi, RemObjects, Xamarin, Qt.
Ironically, actual embedded devices are far easier to program, with Arduino. You type your code in a window (with all boilerplate and build system abstracted away) and click a button, and boom it's compiled and uploaded and running. This is because it was designed to be easy to use - ostensibly to teach young people, but in practice it means lots of hackers use it too.
Yep, it's never been easier
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 summer camps where 7 year old kids learn to program.
I'd say if you really want youth interested in technology, you basically need a "montessori model" for computers. I don't believe that's likely to happen in school; you need funding, which requires measurable results. There's also too much bad stuff on the internet for schools to run that risk at that scale.
There are two rough classes into which I would break "tech guys". 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'm not saying one is better or worse, but at seven years of age, you'll only have the few of the first type _really_ interested. Type two will often switch to a different toy once frustrated (i.e. upon a serious bug). You can't expect everyone to derive the same level of marginal benefit from just playing with tech.
Type twos necessarily better or worse, but we don't put kids into "plumbing boot-camp" at seven expecting them to develop life-long passions. Maybe a few will, but not many. To put it another way, you'll get a lot more kids into architecture letting them play with legos free-form than handing them a kit and saying, "Build this model by following the instructions."
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 today, and you want to learn an adult trade young, your options are still pretty much just artist or programmer.
If there was a way to start doctors or lawyers young, maybe it'd make a difference. As a kid, I knew one girl that was a hospital volunteer, and she ended up going to Africa as an adult to try and make the world a better place by helping others. People don't realize how activities in formative years really stick with kids.
Instead of giving kids meaningful work, we're raising a generation that's going to be great at self-promotion and fortnite.
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 homework is functionally English. Art is functionally understanding of light and shadows, which is best taught through photography. Photography decouples ability to render (drawing) from ability to compose. Until the child is fluent at algebra and written English, teaching other subjects except for athletics relies on the child's innate talent or, more likely, their parents.
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.
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.
> 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 tech. People dont stay long because trying out new toys. If they do, then they are being dishonest with employer, honestly. They stay long because of stress, pressure, disorganization, etc.
The conflation of the two really not logical, it does not even makes sense. Why cant you go home at 5 and "try out new languages for the heck of it" wherever you feel like? Should you even try out that new language production project? (you should not)
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)
Consider Ruby on Rails. It was the most beginner-friendly way to create a web app when it was popular, but the very things that made it that way - opinionated design, sacrificing speed/correctness/scale by using Ruby, "batteries included", and a cultish fanbase that drew new users to it - made it the target of justified criticism from experts who wanted flexibility, type safety, speed, lightweight design, fewer CVEs, and fewer annoying fanboys. Flash came under fire for similar things: performance issues, poor UX when used in the wrong place, constant security vulnerabilities, being a proprietary standard.
These are actually good criticisms! There's no shadowy cabal who arranged feigned outrage over flash vulnerabilities, people were genuinely upset that a proprietary piece of software was turning their browser security into a sieve and stopping screenreaders from working. The criticisms just failed to ask why it was so popular with beginners anyway.
From personal experience, and from the (continuing) weekly HN "Hiring" posts that are looking for Rails devs, Rails is popular because it allows you to build an MVP for an entire product or company over a week. It gets rid of all the distractions when it comes to assembling the perfect stack and just works. It's not perfect by far, but, like Flash, it allows you to shortcut the technical work and get right to the creative work.
But these kids, the clever and curious ones, they'll find this on their own too, and truly many more cool and free things to create stuff with online. A few years back, they were all over these free github student developer packs, especially the credits for a Digital Ocean droplet server, which they used to host sites, minecraft servers (IIRC) or Discord bots.
I think an interesting part of my experience was that it started with watching. I just loved the videos and thought they were hilarious. I admired the people who made those videos and I wanted to join that circle of creators. And Flash didn't prevent me from doing that. Not only that, but it was a specific low-effort style of animation. The path from consumer -> producer was short.
So really, I think you have to look at what people are consuming, and then try and make it easy for them to "participate." I'm not sure if people are consuming Flash-style animations anymore. (Maybe they are, and I just aged out of the demographic.)
It seems like a lot of that creative energy has moved to sandbox games like Minecraft for now, where that community of creators and would-be creators still exists, and away from animation and Web design.
They realize that there's no magic; all it takes to make something nice is a little knowledge, and a lot of work.
From what I've seen of Fortnite, it promotes a different kind of creativity, which is more like creative problem solving (boxing people in, riding rockets, etc.) But it does have a sandbox mode that I've seen some interesting creations from.
And on that point it seems that Flash helped to kill itself by accelerating ubiquitous web video.
It's a great animation tool with a great learning curve, I'm surprised Adobe isn't doing more to get it in the hands of teenagers^w young creators.
The 2D GUIs of many 3D games were written in Flash. There are non-Adobe Flash players which can be embedded. The advantage was the authoring tools - the GUIs could be elaborate and graphical without much effort.
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 of them are smart enough not to use Canvas (much)!
And raises the barrier to maintenance.
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.
If by "framework" you mean "easy to use tool" then I agree.
Programmers are often the last people who should design tools - they dont bat an eye at having to edit a config file, tweak settings, install plugins, manage dependencies, run a compiler or other batch processing tool.
The vast majority of coding should be end user programming. The collective we just wants to own the tools and the jobs.
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.
The CEOs 14 year old son is a straw boy.
Tee Hee
Developers are users as well, and I think too many fail to understand this.
Whatever tooling makes it easier to develop for, means that I can focus on other parts of the problem.
I don't miss working like I did during the late 80, early 90s. Our computers are so much better for them to be reduced to a green phosphor VT-100 terminal.
So much this. Every time someone harps about this or that great terminal application that looks worse than even MS-DOS applications from the late-80s (when most users had moved on from MDA cards) i die a little inside.
End users are way smarter and more capable than programmers give them credit. Applications should be empowering users not capturing them in a walled garden fed by their masters.
If you go back and watch some of the old flash stuff or play old flash games they are not good, they would be completely unnoticed today.
For example, apps that run directly on mobile platforms (specifically, ones that don't need to connect to the 'cloud' to do their compiling):
- For iOS: Codea [1] (Lua), Continuous [2] (.NET), Swift Playgrounds [3] (Swift), Play.js [4] (Node.js + React Native) plus probably more (on that note, I really hope Continuous isn't abandoned, but it doesn't seem to have been updated in awhile).
- For Android: AIDE [5], TIC-80 [6], probably others (I'm not as familiar)
Moving up from mobile, you have FUZE4 Nintendo Switch [7] for the Nintendo Switch (excellent, but needs a bugfix update as there's lots of little annoyances). Probably the most kid-friendly thing there is right now IMHO, if you take into account the platform.
On the PC, there's just a huge amount of stuff. Minecraft [8], GameMaker [9], GDevelop [10], Godot Engine [11]. These are at least suitable for early teens.
[1] https://codea.io/ [2] http://continuous.codes/ [3] https://www.apple.com/au/swift/playgrounds/ [4] https://playdotjs.com/ [5] https://www.android-ide.com/ [6] https://tic.computer/ [7] https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/fuze4-nintendo-switch/ [8] https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/ [9] https://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker [10] https://gdevelop-app.com/ [11] https://godotengine.org/
Note: Yes, obvious game-making bias here :)
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 it.
Then it has GML mode which is their programming language with excellent documentation and a decent community cranking out tutorials and guides, which has put out some seriously legit indie games such as Red Strings Club, Hyperlight Drifter, and Hotline Miami.
It’s also not just for games. It’s great for making interactive stories (I’ve made interactive kids books with it), HTML5 demos and interfaces, 2D physics demos, and even does basic 3D stuff.
(Not affiliated just a big fan and use it extensively).
But I would suggest Godot as an alternative for beginners now. Even though I don't like the proprietary scripting languages either uses by default, between GML and GDScript, the latter seems more powerful, and thus more educational. You can do "drag and drop and make a game for some defnition of a 'game'" in any of the modern game frameworks. But really, that only teaches you how to use the GUI, not how programming works.
Also Godot has a version that uses C#, and there are bindings for other languages out there (I don't know how complete or useful they are, though) whereas unless I'm wrong, with Game Maker you're stuck with GML.
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).
I think there will always be easy ways to break into tech, they just might change from year to year.
As a kid, I could kinda understand how to go from programming in Basic to Pong or Space Invaders.
A kid these days has _so_ many more expectations if they're wondering how Fortnite works...
I had enough hubris as a 12/13 year old to write Space Invaders in ascii in Basic on an Osbourne2, and later to get a quite creditable imitation using sprites on an AppleII.
I wonder if kids these days look at computers and think "I could do that" about anything they care about?
Kids may not no how to go from BASIC to a video-game- but they don't have to write their games in BASIC. There are point and click game studios, there are really great physics engines available, there are libraries that attempt to make it simple.
I remember learning how to build mods in minecraft ~10 years ago- there were tools out there that allowed you to make creatures or blocks that inherited behaviors programmed in other parts of the game- and you could do a lot with that!
I've not tried to do anything like a game for decades, I'm kinda curious about that readily available tools kids could get their hands on these days... Closest I think I've come is launching Scratch from a RasPi's stock linux install...
I've heard great things about 001 Game Creator (free for 7 days, then $60) for more substantial use.
You can still make crappy HTML pages with very basic inline JS, but if you're a kid starting out, that's not enough. You should probably learn a JS framework and some graphic design if you don't want it to be laughed at.
Our field is just becoming more mature and advanced. Cars used to be easier to work on, too.
This "novices" thing seems to me to be overblown though; Alan Kay has been beating the "programming for novices" drum for decades with Smalltalk and basically nothing happened. I would rather have professional-quality tools with decent Youtube tutorials, like Blender, Unity, Python, etc. have been developing.
that's like comparing crack-cocaine den to LARP'ing groups. No way newgrounds is anything comparable to the lows that is tiktok (or vine).
I don't know where the modern equivalent is. Maybe they only pop up every couple of decades...
There is a game product called "Fortnite", and it's just had a huge in-game event, so it's clearly here, alive and well, but you'll never again be able to experience Fortnite as it was 24 hours ago - ever.
And yet future culture is, as Alan Kay puts it, "the past and the present". It's our reaction to that hole, where nothing really builds on anything else, that, in turn, is motivating interest in products with longer time horizons, longer stories and histories to them.
An obvious metaphor for this is video games vs pinball:
* Fundamentally digital vs fundamentally analog
* Mostly design & marketing vs mostly manufacturing
* Trivially cloned vs scarce, unique
* Black-box artifact vs maintainable assembly
* Perpetually caught in the breathless hype cycle of tech, vs increasingly existing outside of that cycle
Pinball's days as part of the traditional amusement business ended with the 1990's, but it's found a resurgence of interest in the home market as a kind of collectable furniture - something to put in a rec room or a basement arcade, that retains decent trade value if maintained. A whole array of small manufacturers have appeared this decade to serve that market. It's much easier to understand a collector's market for it being sustained 30 years out, versus video game collecting, in which any product with a modicum of popularity will have had its primary content either already preserved through piracy(if emulated), or else impossible to reproduce(if a service). It's a much stronger version of interest in vinyl records or dead-tree books taking precedent over streaming music and e-books.
Because digital media has so little physical value, it is beholden to be entirely marketing driven, front-to-back, and to treat you as either a product marketer or as the product, and sometimes both. The true form of the medium remains always hidden behind the UI. Even your personal work, done on systems you wholly control, just disappears into a collection of files, where it is easily forgotten.
And in that sense I think we are not really asking, "Where is Flash? Where is Hypercard? Where is BASIC?" - because in different eras each of those tools did the kinds of things we wanted and expected from a beginner's tool - so much as we are asking, "Where is the actual medium? Where can I do work and preserve the original source material? Where can I send a kid to learn to play with software and not have it all break six months later, rendering the learning useless? How can I curate software when nobody can make any promises?" Tech continues its warfare for a platform monopoly, and so on this front we keep starting from zero, over and over. It's not hugely different from the space we've arrived at in professional software development, where dependency hell and code rot is an ever-increasing concern for all codebases.
If you had a Pentium 1 PC, would you not still be able to run DOS and BASIC on it? Software "breaking" only happens if you let it - you can still use Windows 95, or XP, and run all those old programs that no longer work. If you have a copy of Flash 4 you can still run that on supported hardware, make media using it, and probably still have people with modern Flash installations be able to play it back?
The difference between the pinball machine and video game is not so wide a chasm. The vogue of pinball came and went, and now it is a small community hobby. Hobbies come and go - just look at the resurgence in Dungeons and Dragons the last 10 years adjacent to a huge decline in "AAA" PC game RPGs.
In the same light, while the Fortnite gamer might never be able to re-experience the event that just passed, there are thousands playing Doom maps written in the mid 90s today on engines refined through decades of hobbyist volunteer work to provide features not even often seen in modern titles. And simultaneously there are new Doom maps being made all the time, entire games (look up the Adventures of Square) made with its engine, etc. That technology is now over 25 years "obsolete" but lives on through its community.
You touch on it - but it really does matter if you own it. All these transient experiences being offered as a moment of engagement by corporations all of which are held under lock and key and never see a bidirectional creative process between maker and consumer are all vapid and empty. The digital experiences that endure are those that go both ways, and that everyone involved can lay claim to and participate in.
Modern video games are themeparks, but the tooling available through projects like GZDoom, OpenMW, Godot, etc are sandboxes for creativity that no corporation can take away. This is why the free software movement even began, and why it has only gained relevance as technology has permeated society and culture.
But that concept extends beyond just video games - Blender makes its open movies, there are repositories and communities around free music, art, etc. Communities built around shared worlds all licensed permissively to encourage participation and collaboration in opposition to the common proprietary reality of creative products being weaponized against their own fans through copyright to reject participation. You just have to look for them - they don't have the billions in advertising to permeate your every waking second of consumptive behavior.
I don't think this is realistically true in the age of cloud services and forced, automatic updates.
Maybe it is if you painstakingly stick to decades-old software or FOSS - but this will mean you're missing out on a lot of progress made in modern software.
(edit:)
> ...and probably still have people with modern Flash installations be able to play it back?
Even if you got Flash running on your old PC, this is where things would break. Browsers deliberately increase the friction and technical expertise needed to enable Flash content, with the openly stated goal to drop Flash support completely in the mid-to-near future.
Learning Flash might still be a fun experience if you can keep it on the PC it's produced - but if you want your kid to pass their movies on to anyone else, Flash is nowadays a dead-end.
I agree though with the Doom thing. My suspicion is that in 20 years, many of today's games will be forgotten but people will likely still play FFIV on emulator - not because some artistic quality were better but simply because you can.
Inn 20 years, emulators will probably progress enough that the (non-server-based) games people still care about will be playable -- anything where there's no server, or the server is just a DRM check and all the gameplay happens clientside. Some of the servers will probably be replicable locally for single-player or small-group play, too; I think there's already reverse-engineered server emulation for some online-multiplayer DS games, some of it even having been made before the official servers went offline.
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.
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 release a huge new update - including over digital distribution - users still have the original discs and server software, thus if they want to relive “Fortnite 1997, v1.0’ they can - just reinstall it from the original media.
With the iOS App Store we used to be able to make versioned backups of the IPA files and restore them using desktop iTunes so if an over-the-air update for... say, Angry Birds, added an obnoxious amount of pay-to-win functionality then we had the choice to downgrade before things went to shit.
Now, we can’t do that. This is why I don’t buy mobile games anymore: I have no guarantees about my ability to keep what I paid for.
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...
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)
Sure, it's not like playing the real thing. Neither, in most cases, are emulated video games.
>culture where all the things pressed up closest to the digital universe just disappear into a little footnote on a wiki page saying "yes, this happened". Memes, blog posts, videos, games, etc.
Is this just a fancy way of saying "digital things that are very cheap/free to distribute"? If that's true, then I'd argue that digital things have an outsized impact in people's lives, even more than physical things sometimes. After all, whats more important to you, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or the car you're currently driving?
And since that's the case, what's wrong with charging money for data that was expensive to make, even if it's super cheap to distribute? I feel like that's far more honest than giving away free entertainment data that's been marred by an ad stream.
I think the thing that's pressed up closest is a briefly filled container of code (the browser), that briefly redirects a server thread in front of your eyes. You have a chance to affect it's future course. But there is no ownership at all, not even of the blob that corresponds to the runtime image.
I think its funny that open-source software has created a world where software is even more proprietary than ever - not even the binaries every reach your machine! In that world, distributing binaries only doesn't really seam so bad!
I think we have more "powerful experiences" for novices than ever before, which is part of the whole attention problem. In the early 2000, we didn't have YouTube, Netflix, WhatsApp, TikTok, etc. where tons of teens spend many, many, many hours in nowadays. Those who got access to Flash found a sink for their free time and after just a few hours will have figured out the basic elements. Try to get kids to focus for just these initial few hours on their own, without them getting distracted on some other platform or immediately trying to find a YouTube tutorial, instead of just trying things and actually learning the tool, rather than copying whatever someone else is doing in a video.
It's easy to imagine the various security vulnerabilities could have been fixed by a more responsible/responsive company, and the abuse by advertisement companies should've been solvable with an ad blocker.
JavaScript, CSS, and HTML have come a long way in capability, but the mashup is much more distasteful to me. Flash was elegant despite its frequent misuse.
A tech-savvy artist, who would previously have needed a handful of devs and a publishing company to get a fun toy to a few hundred users, could suddenly build and send something around the world in a week. No wonder it uncovered so many creative projects waiting to happen!!
As someone who wrote a complete 3d modeller for a game, including animation, even before 3dsmax was a thing, I was surprised when a few years later (10+) I saw how easy the Flash UI was to understand, especially the way keyfames were added. The UX was rather extraordinary. Unfortunately even at that time (early iPhone) because Flash was so synonymous with security flaws, I would regularly uninstall it. Since then, I've yet to see a solution that's as easy to use and doesn't have some kind of vendor lock in (like Flash did). Maybe I haven't looked hard enough tho.
As much as I personally disliked the artistic Flash- only sites at the time, hindsight shows that they were rather invaluable. We lost a lot of diversity when Apple killed it off.
People often forget about those.
It's a shame that HTML5 never really reached the ability of flash. And it's also a shame that Adobe didn't simply release the swf spec.
I personally find that mode of development distasteful, and I don’t share the author’s affection for this particular breed of "creativity," but anyway it was there and some folks liked it and there’s a real opportunity for someone who wants to reimagine it.
- you had types, performance was important so you had generic types like Vector , the code was compiled and it was really fast
- there were built-in efficient GUI widgets, you could have a list or table connected to a data provider with tousends of items but the components were smart and only created enough UI widgets as needed to render, where in HTML you either have to create a LI element for all your 10000 elements, create pagination(is not built in), create infinite scrolling(not built-in)
- it was super easy to customize or extend the provided things if you needed , as an example in HTML look at the <select> it is not customizable, everyone has to implement it's own using divs, css and js , but everyone gets it wrong in the corner case(you have issues where the dropdown pops outside the screen, missing events, hell even youtube search box sometimes breaks and the dropdown popup remains stuck open, so even Google engineerscan't create a working dropdown component
- performance, remember when a blinking cursor was causing an electron editor to use a lot of resources , the issue with web is that was designed in rush for showing documents.
- layouting components was super easy , theming was easy - with css in large old projects there are so many issues( I know people use less but this is not standard )
I have some solutions too, browsers need to provide more powerful components, if we want to do RIAs or desktop apps then we need the same components that desktop toolkits offer with the same customization. Other issue I seen was in a project where the devs ahd to import a third party library because the scrollbars can't be themed in all browsers , I am not refering to the right side of the browser ones(I know sme people hate if you change those) but scrollbars on a list or dropdown component. So you have projects where you import 1 lib for scrollbars, 1 lib for modals, 1 for fancy buttons and inputs, 1 for drag and drop, 1 for calendar widgets, 1 for dropdown that allows you to have icon + text, and of course a framework like angular or react . Browsers should check what developers need the most and add that as standard( ex better dropdowns) you would still have the ability to make your own shit and use your preferred framework
Someone with artistic talent could quickly learn flash and get something bizarre working very quickly. Drop the minimally skilled into a modern development environment and novelty is much harder. 95% of the time that’s probably a good thing, but it sucked a lot of the fun out of the internet.
But that’s not what we’re talking about, is it? We can ask what’s actually being done in web design these days… and who’s doing it. If you’re old enough to remember the period from the late ’90s to the mid aughts, think about your friends who were putting all kinds of wacky, creative pages on the web. Picture that personality type. What place does it have in the universe of websites that we visit today?
The answer, as far as I’ve seen: user. We spend time on a smaller number of sites/platforms. The design of those sites tends to be (at its best) streamlined and optimized. And people who want to share their creativity are given little frames within that structure.
Even personal websites are usually built through WordPress, Squarespace, or similar. Something has been lost. I’m not going to say things are worse nowadays. That would be too sweeping a judgment, even if I substantially agreed with it, and I think I don’t. But I get this weird feeling when I spend time online, like it’s a tree that died some time ago, but it’s being reinforced, made to stand straighter than ever, given artificial leaves that never turn, etc.
contestable. html5 games can be choppy in ways flash was not. even streaming video was pretty fast, comparing it to something like webrtc multi-party video. Hell even basic text-based chat like slack is a resource hog in html.
We know there are better technologies security wise and performance wise. It's not always about what is 'technically' better rather than something that people enjoyed using and opened the door to creative personalities for the web. There is a time and a place for both and I think there has been neglect for the other side of the brain.
In terms of capabilities though there was much less worry about compatibility.
And make it streamable. No, your fancy JSON over Websocket is not exactly streamable.
ensuring that the user sees the exact same thing on any browser / operating system combination ?
Just the font rendering differences between windows / mac make it impossible to create text that is supposed to fit perfectly in a given box because hinting differences may mean that you are a few pixels longer which can change the layout of a paragraph, etc...
with flash, there is only one single way things look across all platforms.
A consistent display was a nice thing to count on when making little games, applets and ads. However for general web layout it made accessibility features difficult to impossible to implement.
I'd also add that behaviour wasn't always consistent. There would still be OS/environment specific bugs that would crop up from time to time. (Though granted, these would rarely be related to rendering or layout)
well, that was not the point of flash, was it ?
Still, I don't think we have an adequate replacement, even it would be technically possible, I don't know about similar tools for vector animations..
Lots of solutions to this:
* SickBeard ran a local web server and the UI ran in your browser.
* Electron / Nwjs
* Whatever Microsoft has planned for Electron (Electron Runtime?)
* That Microsoft compiled HTML format thats defunct mostly (chtml).
As much as everyone hates on the web. Its a consistent UI platform. Not 100% consistent every single time but you can get pretty darn close.
Tom Fulp from Newgrounds has nice things to say about Construct, and we’re getting very positive numbers from other portals and platforms (some very big) that a lot of volume of games and good quality ones at that are being published with them using Construct 3.
I’d like to hear from more experienced Flash users if there’s anything Construct 3 can’t do that Flash could as it would likely be an important feature we’d be keen to add!
Basically, it has to have a name amiable to becoming an umbrella term. That gave Flash such a "universal" connotation.
I hope this makes sense - trying to convey the _peculiarities_ of "Flash" which made it (as I see it) successfull and distinct in character.
Due to the nature of present browser APIs you cannot name your editor WebGL or something that produces WebGL. But if you made an editor called Sparkle or something that produced .sparkle files that had native browser support you would have the same nomenclature going on. But native browser integration and containerized file formats with external editors aren't a well made match.
I think the modern browser is technologically superior to what and how Flash did things (with the exception of native sockets, which is probably for the better). It's really everyone using Adobe's content creation tools (which were well integrated/designed) that made things so low friction.
It took a long time for the browser technologies to catch up but I wonder if in the end it integrates as one system better than bolting on an open flash spec would have been.
I really feel like flash's heyday was before adobe bought it up. Most of the best flash sites, newgrounds and stuff were more active and had tons of content while Macromedia still owned flash.
More to the point, I think that the current DRM scheme is inherently and completely broken. I could use it and let websites pretend it's useful, but it's not worth the increased quantity of proprietary code to me.
The nice thing about the way EME was implemented is if you aren't one of those users you can simply disable Widevine or (if you prefer to not even have proprietary code on your computer) use a build that doesn't include it.
The public premise that DRM is about stopping "piracy" was always a lie. Obviously, it can't do that. In fact, DRM encourages piracy by reducing the value of non-pirated versions of things.
DRM exists to control and manipulate regular, honest customers, such as making them watch ads or to pay over and over for different copies of the same thing even when they actually have the legal right to make copies for their own use.
Depends on what you mean by superior. There are still things Flash could do and modern “open web” can’t, determining keyboard state (caps lock state and current input language) is one example.
Adobe has been trying to maintain backwards compatibility with flash (because most studios were still using the last version macromedia put out over 10 years ago) So adobe animate was always doomed to try and please everyone and end up pissing everyone off.
We have tons of memes uploaded each day, with crude animations, that could have been 10x easier with flash...
eh, no it hasnt, and even if it did it would have nothing to do with flash. Flash was a great domain-specific tool for somthing that is significantly more cumbersome to write (and difficult to debug, and less wysiwyg) in canvas. Plus technology is supposed to move forward and 20 years is a geologic timespan in internet years. We expected to have much, much better tools by now, not a barely equivalent
Back then, a Flash game was the epitome of web entertainment. Now, we have thousands of amazing Youtube videos, Netflix originals, memes, and so on. If you were to give people the same flash games now, they'd find them ridiculously lame.
> If you were to give people the same flash games now, they'd find them ridiculously lame.
Some of the most popular social games are like farmville, or some poker games. those are really equivalent of flash
On Unity I agree. It's never going to have 50kb games that download and start instantly. It's also not particularly easy or good for working with 2D games. I've used both professionally.
thats exactly why i mention them . i meant to say their current html versions are equivalent of their previous flash
But it gets really pedantic arguing the semantics of web flash - fundamentally it was only showing on a web page because you installed the browser plugin or it. Today browsers might have stopped supporting arbitrary library plugins like that but now you can write them in webassembly for the same ends. Its just that nobody has actually gone and done it yet.
As a game developer who has programmed in ActionScript3, I can tell you that Flash was very performant for 2D graphics.
Why is it on Apple to save Adobe’a software? Why not Microsoft, BlackBerry, Google ... or Adobe?
> Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem
iPhoneOS lacked support for Flash long before it had a native SDK. Jobs decided the answer was HTML, which is exactly the opposite of a locked-in ecosystem.
Here is the Jobs quote from when this happened: "He takes a while to get there, but eventually he puts the notion into a nutshell. "Flash is a cross platform development tool," he says. "It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps.""
""Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs"
> 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_Store_(iOS) :
>... prior to its unveiling in 2007, Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs did not intend to let third-party developers build native apps for iOS, instead directing them to make web applications for the Safari web browser. However, backlash from developers prompted the company to reconsider, with Jobs announcing in October 2007 that Apple would have a software development kit available for developers by February 2008
You can also read about an actual iPhone engineer's thoughts on the matter https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-engineer-reveals-real-r...
Interesting tidbit: Apple was actually trying to work with Adobe to iron out Flash's security problems but was rebuffed.
Anyways, the fact is, the App Store was actually an afterthought.... An accident of history that even Steve didn't see coming. The decision to forego Flash came way before that.
This combined with updated app review guidelines banning flash on iOS accelerated the adoption of html5.
Afterthought or not, apps quickly became the biggest selling point of smartphones from the second gen onward and many technical architecture decisions had the intended effect of locking developers in. Ports to android were often delayed by months and years if they happened at all.
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.
It makes a lot of sense if the primary goal is to make good technology and software. Is that seriously so hard to understand?
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...
Wait, what? They had years to demonstrate it working well on Android. They failed. Spectacularly. Why are you ignoring widely accepted fact of tech history? Are you implying that is also Apple's fault?
Look, if you want to discuss Apple being anti-competitive I'm all ears. I more or less agree. But using Flash as an example does nothing to help your argument. That's because everything Apple claimed about why Flash wouldn't work on mobile was later proven to be true. Everything.
Flash on Android was a disaster. Ignoring that fact to claim it could have worked on iOS (because... magic?) is nothing but revisionist anti-Apple zealotry.
Never let facts get in the way of a good Apple-bashing I guess.
Let me translate that:
Steve Jobs did not intend to let anyone else profit from iOS, instead directing them to make web applications for the Safari web browser that would provide subpar experience.
They released a publicly accessible SDK in less than 4 months? And you believe it wasn't in their plan at all to allow anyone else to develop on it? They clearly planned to have a way to sideload app on it. Itunes already existed since 2001, it wasn't anything new for them. The only things they decided to change was to allow everyone to access it.
Flash would have been a way to allow everyone to access much more powerful feature. This is why they avoided it. The app store was an alternative that allowed them to keep control of it.
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.
For those of you half-considering building a Flash player replacement, I suspect the majority of Flash content (especially pre-AS3) can run performantly on modern mobile browsers with a canvas Context2D shim. Maybe even on 2010-era mobile devices.
Compare that to Flash video series like Homestar Runner, every episode had little Easter eggs where you could click on background characters to unlock a bonus scene about them. It really helped you feel engaged with the medium in a way unmatched by anything but full-length video games.
Hehe. Not really. Jobs may have put one nail in the coffin, but Adobe killed flash. And flash was already dying because of abusive ads and HTML5 before Apple said anything. Here’s one of the Flash developers backing that up: https://m.slashdot.org/story/324267
For years, they were terrified of making any changes, especially ones that might break backward compatibility. This lack of ability to change anything meant their brightest never stuck around very long. This only made those who were left even more terrified to make any changes because the institutional knowledge was gone. It's a vicious cycle.
By the time they realized they had to make serious changes and started work on stage3d, they didn't have the expertise necessary to pull it off.
That's an interesting comment. I actually wonder whether this eventually happens for any successful product. At the end this gives competitors a chance to surpass the product. So it's definitely a cycle.
For example, the fact that most engineers need to job hop in order to get promotions and raises. That makes it nearly impossible to build up long term institutional knowledge at any one company.
Another example: everyone in a publicly held company, from the rank and file programmers to the CEO, are rewarded for short term sales at the expense of long term stability. We had a thread here not too long ago[0] about how being a "maintenance engineer" was career suicide.
AI can do a decent job upscaling flash-style content from low res videos.
Macromedia / Adobe released it quite a bit ago (while Flash was still popular).
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 tools.
If Adobe had opened Flash and had a sane security Sandbox it would have survived iOS. Adobe was like the old Microsoft though. They just didn’t get the power of Open Source.
When the tide was turning against them with the rise of iOS, they should have full open sourced Flash player and made the authoring tools free to use, and encourage competing authoring tools.
Flash would likely have then been on a track towards full standardization and native support in browsers. Adobe's authoring tools would likely be best-of-breed and indispensable for high end web dev. All the security and performance and interoperability problems could have been solved over time. Flash is not all that different from an SVG to be honest.
One counterpoint to make: Flash sites were to my knowledge static layouts, the very opposite of responsive design. That is a big industry shift that Flash never made.
Instead Adobe threw in the towel and encouraged breaking a large portion of the old internet by deprecating it.
I think moves like these amount to hundred billion dollar drags on the economy. In a sense we're all a little bit poorer as a result. It's like digging a hole and filling it back up again. It's economic activity that benefits no-one.
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 couldn’t even visit the Xoom marketing page running Flash from a Xoom for the first six months.
Adobe could never get Flash working on mobile well.
EDIT: It wasn’t until the iPhone 5 introduced 5 years later in 2012 that there was an iPhone that could have met Adobe’s specs for Flash.
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.
Someone needs to take over this space.
And then Macromedia got "Eloped"...
It's crazy how Adobe never leveraged that community and just pissed everybody off then it died out...
There was also that kind of "friendly" competition where teams add to come up with the most bad ass interactive experience and brands had huge budgets to promote this or that product. It was an healthy relationship between marketing and creativity. Everybody even now, remember at least some Flash websites. "2advanced" anybody? Who remembers the design of the web sites they visit today? It's all the same.
Obviously at some point, Flash ads became a nuisance, and mobile kind of killed it in the browser...
> Flash would likely have then been on a track towards full standardization and native support in browsers.
Unfortunately no, because TC39 rejected Ecmascript 4. Ironically, Microsoft who is responsible for Typescript is to blame for that. Because they had their own solution "Silverlight", it was short-sighted.
Adobe Flex did data-driven responsive design just fine. It was the popular framework before es5 and html5 made it obsolete.
Some were, the bad ones, but most were not.
I did a lot Flash back in that time and it was all responsive.
I think Tech took a weird turn somewhere around 2010. Things became more homogeneous, designes became bland without rough edges, literally with rounded corners. Options were removed, defaults became simpler and dumber. Dev tools are more about saving programmers from themselves rather than pushing things to the limit. Flash is probably an example of it
I’m not sure about a “dumber” design discipline though. Really it’s Windows developers being left behind, for a while now.
And where we are at now, where Macromedia got bought and Adobe slowly drained its lifeblood and killed its products, is what happens when you try to build systems on top of holistically proprietary foundations. Nobody owes you their enduring survival and you are totally dependent on whoever owns the platform to give you their blessing.
Its a lesson Apple developers often love waxing poetic all over the front page of HN about on the regular.
Plus webrtc is proving to be a resource hog every time, and a lot more complicated to set up in an app (separate media / data stream etc). flash/red5 works literally out of the package.
> obviously it's going to improve over time
When? webrtc is like 10 years old. How long we have to wait to go back to 1999?
Well, 8 from initial release. 18 months from first stable release.
Far as I understand it, lag and overheating are hardware/network problems. Considering the amount of development going into both of them, that situation is only going to improve but of course I don't have a roadmap.
FWIW I haven't noticed problems with either and I don't have a mind blowing setup.
I look at what browsers are doing now compared to 1999, there's no way I'd want to go back
Zoom has done some nice stuff in bypassing webrtc and instead using a webassembly connector to move video and audio.
This is the result of web devs targeting smart phones. They've made the web suck bending over backwards for the limited abilities of phones to act as computers in both the UI and network sense.
I would spend entire holidays messing around in flash obsessively. Also then got into mxml and Flex.
Yeah I then learnt C, Java, JavaScript, Python etc but it wasn’t really as fun as Flash. Flash had progressive unwrapping of complexity. You could create impressive games in Flash quite easily. I learnt a ton by decompiling existing games from miniclip.com (love that site) and changing things to see what effect they had. Kirupa.com was a fantastic resource too.
Oh man. I could talk for hours about Flash and the self learning experiences.
Not a bad thing, but once I learned some of those basics, I no longer had fun toying around with animations and creating, and instead spent my time writing classes and functions. It became a lot harder to 'hack' things together, and, for me, less fun.
And besides that, plenty of real coding tools already existed, and HTML/CSS/JS was improving really quickly as well. So I ended up learning those instead.
All of that was actually great for my design career, but Flash just didn't have a place anymore. And I'm still sad about that.
I don’t disagree with that but I think it needs to be in the larger context of Adobe being bad at almost everything related to platform support. Their APIs were not well-considered; consistency happened at other companies; the tools were expensive, poorly designed, buggy, and basically unsupported (“The Flash IDE crashes when I do X”. 10 months pass. “Pay $800 for the upgrade and let us know if that fixes it ”), and performance/battery impacts always lagged behind the native alternatives — all of which sucked the fun out of the creative process as you had to take time away for pure drudgery working around Adobe’s slacking.
If at any time they’d invested 10% more on quality and basic software engineering they wouldn’t have had all of their customers looking for alternatives. As we saw, that can be more profitable for a short period but catches up hard.
After AS3, I remember switching to Flex, and basically using it like any current language. Although I absolutely hated the MXML syntax. I was pretty sad at the time, since AS3 was my main language, but looking back at it now, I think it was for the better.
If anything I applaud Adobe by starting fresh instead of, say, accumulating warts in the language/VM the way Java did.
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 held down the REC button and watched the character act as the animation was being ‘recorded’. To do something new, you just stopped recording, set the character up for the next action, move, etc, then do the whole REC thing again. Repeat this as needed.
Adding another character? Scrub back to where you wanted that character to appear and repeat the above process.
New background? Scrub to where you wanted the new background to appear, set the background and then ‘record’ over the old one.
It was similar for everything. Put a speech bubble down where you wanted it, hold down ‘REC’ for as long as you wanted it on the screen, then just remove it and record further as needed.
It was so damn intuitive. Never seen anything quite like it since and I’d love to know if there’s a clone of it or something out there that I’ve missed!
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 beast. Different screen sizes, an explosion of aspect rations, heavier security requirements, accessibility, touch controls and more led to the downfall.
Pecking on a tiny video player with your finger to change volume, quality, or playback position was a terrible experience and the battery drain wasn't great either. Watching videos outside of YouTube was a terrible time for phone users before sites transitioned to HTML5.
Flash was a bundle of good things and bad things, as we all more or less agree. Good for creativity, bad for usability and accessibility and security, etc.
You could, obviously, do so many things in Flash that were impossible with web standards.
But, why was there such a gap between what you could do in Flash and what you could do with web standards? Why was Flash even necessary?
This was due in large part to how Microsoft acquired a stranglehold on the web right as it was beginning to really take off -- IE4, IE5, and IE6 were the defacto standards, and Microsoft used them to quash innovation on the web as they (successfully) tried to hold on to their desktop software business for another decade or so.
Perhaps we haven't lived through the worst possible timeline, but there was certainly a better outcome possible - where Microsoft didn't stifle innovation on the web for close to a decade.
(And now, of course, we're approaching another dark age as Google heads toward IE6-like market share....)
Instead AOL bought them and realized that was a mistake.
I don't think it was 64-bit clean, either, so now no modern device runs Flash "natively."
Microsoft didn't "quash" any innovation, the ActiveX framework allows more innovation than any other browser on the market, Flash was invented as an ActiveX plugin, so does AJAX and it started the whole Web 2.0 era. IE had so much incredible feature that it makes modern looks like a dull corporate utility. We had VRML and vector graphics. We can playback videos with IMG tags. Heck we can even embed the mighty DirectX on Web. Chrome basically re-invented everything we already had with dHTML in the 90s.
Microsoft didn't took down ad blockers by crippling the API. In fact there's innovative abuse problem with IE, think all those toolbars!
Once I typed it up, I realized it was all dudes, so let me first link to https://flashgoddess.com/spotlight/ , who shone a spotlight on the women who worked in the same space. (Shoutout to Lisa Larson-Kelley, fellow alumnus of FlashCodersNY, and Stacey Mulcahy, whose hilarious AS2-to-AS3 migration talk was fucking awesome!)
If you wish to view any of these links, I recommend pasting them into web.archive.org and setting the Wayback to the mid-to-late 2000's.
mrdoob.com (Mr. doob, later created three.js) audiotool.com, lab.andre-michelle.com (Andre Michelle) wefail.com (Jordan Stone, Martin Hughes) gskinner.com (Grant Skinner, later created EaselJS, etc) quasimondo.com (Mario Klingemann) bytearray.org (Thibault Imbert) bit-101.com (Keith Peters) vectorpark.com (Patrick Smith) hoogerbrugge.com (Han Hoogerbrugge) levitated.net (Jared Tarbell) blog.joa-ebert.com (Joa Ebert (also audiotool)) orisinal.com (Ferry Halim) hospital.apoka.com (Edouard Artus) kirupa.com (Kirupa Chinnathambi) mosessupposes.com (Moses Gunesch) gotoandlearn.com, theflashblog.com (Lee Brimelow)
Most of these folks also spoke at tech events, sharing techniques and hard-learned lessons. Like that time when Wefail gave a talk that took a memorably heavy shit on Jakob Nielsen. Hell yes.
Also worth noting the HBO Voyeur promotional site made by Big Spaceship: archive.bigspaceship.com/hbovoyeur
The Flash community was creative and groundbreaking as hell. Most of the folks who criticized it for being proprietary and insecure are lifelong users of proprietary, insecure platforms; the worst aspects of the Flash-equipped web linger still, namely ads, inaccessibility and site bloat; and let's face it, as capable as the modern web client stack is, it's lost so much ground to the walled garden platforms, that Steve Jobs's 2010 agenda can no longer be seen as anything but duplicitous.
Godspeed, FutureSplash! You were to good for this web.
JavaScript game libs simply aren't as featureful, even the ones promising the scenegraph API. They don't work as well cross platform (by the end of that decade I had one codebase which could deploy to web, iOS, and Android); and that's where the audience has headed.
I hope this book spends some time on flash's contribution to video game design as well as web design.
Also flash never worked cross platform in the modern sense (phones + tablets + desktop). It's a very hard problem and no system I know of handles it automatically for anything more than simple HTML text forms
Flash got me started in web design as a kid and put me on a path to earning a good living. Lots of things changed since then but I want to hear your thoughts on one specifically.
It used to be cool to try things and put something together that in the grand scheme of things is kind of bad. I get the feeling that's not the case anymore.
Seems like there's so much pressure to sell the image of you being an expert, there is no room to try wild things and see what happens - which is the basis for learning and development btw. What we get then is everyone copying the "expert" patterns, but hardly anyone doing anything original or truly creative, because it feels risky.
This is probably true for a lot of other creative endeavours that have big $ behind them - the movie industry comes to mind. Sure, there are more movies being made now than ever, but it sure as hell doesn't feel like we're in the most creative era and you know it's got nothing to do with the tools.
Someone please tell me otherwise.
You don't really get that visceral moment of magic reaction from web technologies or super polished game engines which is where that happens now.
I feel terrible for kids today - they grow up into social media not knowing what it is, and by the time they can comprehend it their creativity has been stifled for years by the implied pressures of conformity and a cultural disapproval of failure.
But theres some nostalgia in that too - its not like every 80s and 90s kid was sitting in a computer lab inventing the next tower defense game. It has always been a tiny minority of kids that get creative from a young age, and if anything the continued availability and quantity of entertainment can serve to keep kids occupied with consumption rather than creation more today than ever before.
Most of the time, though, Flash was the multimedia CD-ROM of the web. Flash was an extension shoehorned in, didn't feel like the rest of the web, and didn't deeply integrate with the browsing experience.
Flash content was an alien rectangle, a wormhole into a strange dimension, where a mouse click would often not behave anything like a mouse click usually would.
Flash pretended to be on the web, but Flash was not of the web. That's why it's now gone.
HTML and JavaScript are so sloppy and incrementally improved by accretion rather than taste, I lean towards the sewer point of view.
Contrast that with the first pure HTML sites I created, which were built with tables and frames. I shudder thinking back at some of those sites, which were an absolute clusterfuck of nested tables. Flash was like a playground compared to the restrictive environment of building in HTML and CSS in those days, and it seemed like every client project I worked on was very different in its function and UX.
Fast-forward to today, and even with what we can do with modern web technologies, if you look at many sites these days, they're all pretty much the same - especially if they're sales sites. They all use a very familiar cookie-cutter style format. You know the sites I'm talking about; top nav bar, hero image with a wanky quote, 3-block row outlining the nifty features, a call-to-action button etc.
Don't get me wrong, I've seen some beautiful sites come about in the post-Flash era, and some pretty nifty effects (parallax movement seemed to gain a lot of popularity for a time). I think that modern web design really just shows how far we've come in terms of optimisation.
And there's nothing wrong with that. Most of this has come about because we've all spent collective time and effort to get here and discovered what works best for users (in most cases) what converts sales the easiest, etc. It's a culmination of the evolution of tooling, frameworks, boilerplates and various styles we've all built with along the way that continues to evolve.
We know through other mediums and media that users like familiarity (The Mere-exposure effect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect), and so, the web ends up all looking the same as well because more familiarity equals fewer barriers and distractions and hopefully more sales/conversions/eyeballs.
We had RealPlayer, Quicktime, and others, but video on the web was rather difficult.
Websites for design firms were literal masterpieces. Now, those same firms have beautiful, yet predictable, websites.
The user experience was entirely unique from site to site. No side vertical stack of buttons, no top nav bar. Designers back then encouraged exploration. You just don't see that anymore.
Overall, websites are way better now. But we have certainly lost something as the entire web has become commoditized and homogenized. No one is willing to take risks anymore. The late 90s and 2000's was a different kind of internet than it is now, for sure.
This change is not only because of the loss of flash.
The death of Flash meant the death of her childhood and while I still make my living developing for and on the web - my wife has basically been locked out of it because she hasn't been able to find anything "modern" that really takes Flashes place. She can write HTML and simple CSS, and even tweak tiny bits of Javascript or even PHP here and there but nothing at the level of expressivity that she could do with Flash.
Ultimately, the death of Flash was the death of our childhood.
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 experimental, interesting stuff on Newgrounds.
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.
As a tool for building whole websites meant to convey information, it was always shit. If lazy web developers hadn't collectively abused flash to make annoying websites and dumb ads, perhaps we could still have fun flash games on the web today.
Why has nobody been able to build a Flash clone to create content for the canvas element? I've looked at Adobe Animate and it is nowhere near being in the same class as Flash.
It was a one stop shop for creative expression with thousands of people learning the program and excited to share their knowledge.
Nothing does what flash did, because flash did everything and everyone was using it.
Nowadays you've got no chance of working out what a site is doing or how it's working - view source is a litter of external resources which you've got to follow until hell freezes over. And apparently now you've got to brew-grunt-git-node-fuckknowswhatelse in order to get anything running at all.
I'm an old git and it's hackneyed to say it but I miss the simpler old days. I'm really hoping the Javascript trend dies quickly so beginners / amateurs can get back in the game.
Now: Flash: what's interesting to me is that what Flash offered genuinely doesn't seem to be a thing that can be done any more. We do a lot of rich content work and frequently get asked about making online experiences to help explain concepts or ideas as infographics or games. Flash was may bad things, but the universality and really easy to use building tools just don't seem to have been replaced by anything comparable. Or maybe I've missed it?
In short, I think that the open & open-ended, non-strict support-all-the-technologies nature of the web is too free for creative production. There's too much. There's a known principle that limitations are crucial to creative expression to the same degree the "tools" and "medium" are. We need an open-source spiritual successor to flash which utilizes the wonder web ecosystem but exposes a more constrained API so that games/interactive experiences are portable and to an extent LIMITED again.
But within a day, Wired magazine published an op-ed masquerading as a factual article, hating on Flash; and never stopped that drumbeat. "Flash. Must. Die." it (literally) wrote.
And then, it was a total pile-on. No "serious programmer" would go anywhere near it, nor admit that there was anything positive about it at all. One could not mention Flash without devs asserting loudly that it was "riddled with security holes" (always "riddled", always "security holes").
I learned some lessons that year, about tech, devs, corporations and people.
In fact some might even been playing Animate AOT compiled games on their iOS devices.
Obligatory Gabo Corp Intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-ESJS911c
"R.i.p. Robotlegs" (lol @ https://github.com/robmoorman/as3-robotlegs-library)
which uses Flare: https://www.2dimensions.com/about-flare
(and is using an Open Source runtime that runs natively)
I was pretty heartbroken when Macromedia acquired it because I knew they'd muck it up. It was hardly anytime at all before they added huge amounts of complexity, and bugs with it, and jacked the price up to a painful point.
I never did buy anything from MacroMedia and I quit buying Adobe software around ten years ago. I don't miss them a bit, but I do still miss FutureSplash.
The most creative Era of the Internet was the Web.
And then there was utter genius like Homestar Runner, which made it almost worth it.
http://superior-web-solutions.com/
Enable Flash, turn up the sound and whatever you do, do NOT skip the intro.
It shows all the problem the web had back then: It took me four clicks to see actual text about what the authors are trying to say/sell. Everything before was crying "wow look at the amazing technology we can build".
For many web developers at that time (including me), this was a reason why we hated Flash (and intro pages, in general). At some level, the web got more professional after the Flash times, when content was written in HTML again, and SEO was a thing. Unfortunately, today, Javascript takes over the role of Flash and at many sites, without JS there is no text appearing/embedded in HTML only.
Vector tweening in 1985. Though not interactive. (and I think the video is sped up a bit)
I tried swftools with not much success. A few commercial apps weren’t much help either. And Google’s tool (forgot its name) was taken down.
Why is it so hard to replace with something equally as good that works on mobile?
Greensock is the only thing that feels remotely like the good parts of Flash to me.
But it does less, and requires learning some Javascript.
I would be interested to give it another attempt, if I could find someone to help with some parts, like keyframing or tweening. The goal would be to create a fully open source studio to produce rich hypermedia productions using web standard technologies (HTML, CSS, JS, SVG) directly in a web browser. We would build on existing efforts and prior art where possible.
I'm not clear how to build a keyframe timeline or bezier graph for property tweening, nor am I sure whether shape tweening is possible with CSS or SVG.
https://github.com/daybrush/scenejs-timeline
Granted, Scene.js seems oriented towards short animations.
Building a hypermedia studio, even with Scene.js as a component, that could produce something as elaborate as Homestar Runner would need considerable effort.
The idea here is basically an open source, web standards-based alternative to Adobe Animate.
https://github.com/jagenjo/litegui.js
It looks like litegui.js is capable of producing UI widgets similar to Adobe Animate, and other desktop animation software.
Lord Destros.
I'll await Bloomberg's coverage of when those two get topped.
It is a shame that the tooling for animation online doesn't appear to be good. I guess the reality is probably that it's just cheaper and easier to render your animation to video, or release as a game. Game engines are working harder to target browsers as a platform, so the latter option will probably come full circle.
Funny how things change.
The community from Flash 4 (late 90s) / AS2 to FlashDevelop + AS3 (2007/8) was very fun to be a part of. AS3 was big and was based off of ES4, it really kickstarted Javascript development as well into overdrive. Everything big early on the web was Flash, From Joe Cartoon to Stain Boy to Praystation to Papervision which inspired three.js to gaming sites like Newgrounds and Kongregate and more. Flash pushed WebGL in the browser and HTML5/Canvas/video. Flash made the web interactive and fun. Flash was apps before mobile apps. While there could be overuse of Flash intros, on the flipside some of the most amazing game, video and interactive experiences and platforms started with Flash. Promotional games and game sites in Flash were huge pre-mobile.
Flash revolutionized video and made Youtube possible. Video was a mess before it. Both Flash and eventually Silverlight pushed innovation in this area leading to H.264 and HTML5 video capabilities. Flash was during a time where developers with plugins were pushing trends in the browser, not large corp.
Still to this day it is hard to recreate all the features of Flash with web standards but Flash was the plugin that pushed us forward the most on the web. The self-contained platform nature of Flash allowed focus on the app/game/interactive content and less fighting with technology, it was almost like an early console. Flash could do web requests/services before AJAX, so for a time it was the way to do web apps. I'll miss plugin innovation that was always ahead of standards. I will miss innovation on the web from Flash and the access that plugins had to push forward.
Flash was very well run when Macromedia ran it. Adobe bought it mainly for the video platform and to take competitors to Photoshop/Illustrator off the market in Macromedia Fireworks/Freehand. Adobe let both Director and Flash wither and did not react to hardware/software rendering soon enough. If Macromedia had kept in the game it might have gone differently. The period where Silverlight and Flash were competing was also quite nice, just before the mammoth mobile arrived in 2007/8 that changed everything. Smartphones revolutionized apps/interactives and game development, leading to a new handheld gaming/app platform that attracted most if not all Flash developers.
I got started in interactive development and game development professionally with Flash in the mid to late 90s. The release of Flash 4 was the beginning of a decade plus of massive innovation, pushed mostly by Flash. I made my first professional game in 2000 and did Flash games/interactives for a decade+. Now I do Unity, Unreal, WebGL/three.js and others for apps/games/web. Flash allowed me to work at agencies and helped the leap to professional game development. Unity/Unreal and WebGL became the places that most people in Flash ended up who were focused on games/interactives.
Adobe should have moved faster with Adobe AIR and HTML5 support as well as native/hardware acceleration, ultimately the slowness on mobile let it slip, the browsers blocking plugins pushed Flash from the web. Amazing creative designers and developers ended up either doing Unity games/apps/interactives or WebGL/canvas/three.js games/apps/interactives.
OpenFL [1], Haxe[2] and Lime [3] with FlashDevelop [4] is still out there for Flash development. In terms of empowering people to learn technology and see immediate results it is still a great platform.
Adobe Animate CC (renamed from Flash) is still great for animation, most large animated shows use Animate/Flash [5] or ToonBoom. One of the earliest exciting things about Flash was the ability to create cartoons and shows online, it is still one of the best tools for that and most popular animated shows use it that are 2D based. Flash being vector based really helps out for animation and scaling. For animated shows, there isn't another tool that comes close yet, Flash is still king in 2D animation.
[4] https://www.flashdevelop.org/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...
Go to the old homestarrunner site, grab a flash file and play it (in the browser if you still have support, or using a rendering library) on a UHD screen. Yes, you can render that ancient 2000s era video .. in 4k. Flash is dead as a door nail though, and Homestar will now only be at the resolution of when they rendered it for YouTube.
I also hated the anti-flash tech crowd in Silicon Valley. One person I knew ‘Jason’ would get violently angry about flash...
And he was so vehemently opposed to flash, that regardless of his arguments against, he just made himself look like an ass.
Think BOFH or typical NetworkNazi against flash... but he couldn’t succinctly state “why” other than “it’s a piece of shit”. - fuck that guy. (And the other guy who wanted to fight me when I said that apple was going to go to intel based procs...)
Flash was GREAT (from a creative) aside from “give me a bigger damn game screen!”
It is noteworthy that professional/corporate creators haven't followed the hobbyists and kids into some of these spaces to represent their brands as much as they did into the land of Web+Flash. I don't see how that matters when measuring the "Internet's Most creative Era."
Consumers are more savvy, and brands are have gained some wisdom to not step on territory that makes them appear inauthentic and creepy. Second Life was an interesting experiment, but I'm happy that big brands haven't made ads in Roblox yet.
Unity, scratch, blender, these are all programming related. They are not beginner friendly at all.
itch.io isn't a tool either, but a website for distributing. The content you find on there are good, but most are not made with something easy like the flash animations would've been. Game maker comes close, but it isn't well suited for animation.
There isn't, and hasn't been, a replacement for flash animation suite, which is such a great, easy to use, integrated tool of drawing, animation and timing with a relatively simple scripting model. Even amateurs are able to make interesting animations with it. I bet you can't say the same for any of the tools named above.
Flash was also a platform, though you were still reliant on a host like Newgrounds to upload to. All of this is relevant to today's ecosystems. YouTube, Itchio and others have grown beyond anything in the Flash era.
> There isn't, and hasn't been, a replacement for flash animation suite, which is such a great, easy to use, integrated tool of drawing, animation and timing with a relatively simple scripting model. Even amateurs are able to make interesting animations with it. I bet you can't say the same for any of the tools named above.
I agree that the learning curve for Blender, Unity, etc, is probably a bit steeper than Flash. That wasn't the point of the article linked, nor is it what I'm arguing.