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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

>Thinking back, I'm also a little disappointed that after the death of Flash, it felt like Canvas never really took its place. The playful web that came before it in some ways simply closed up.

I've been wondering if this is cultural or technical. The things that are easy to do get done more, and thus the tech (and how well it's designed) shapes mass behavior and culture. On the other hand, where there's a will to do something, a way will be found, or created...

A great example is sending Flash holiday greeting cards in the email. Watching them with my mom is one of my favorite computer-related childhood memories. Yet they seemed to go out of style long before Flash did.

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Some of this has got to be the fact that macromedia flash originally was more targeted to artists and it was dead simple to create nice 2d animations. AKA it wasn't a programming environment so much as an artistic tool. The current version (adobe animate) doesn't seem nearly as popular despite the fact that it can apparently target html/canvas. Part of that just might be fragmentation, with wick editor, opentoonz, there isn't a single tool everyone talks about. Although I'm not sure if those tools can legitimately "grow" into programming tools the way flash and now animate can. (aka the artist draws up a bunch of stuff and then needs to learn some programming or have a programmer to come along and fix the donate button so it actually takes money like was possible with flash).

OTOH, I used to know a bunch of artistic types that had pirated copies and would sit around and create flash animations for their bands/etc. Now those people just do video editing and post things to youtube/etc, or spend time editing photos for facebook/etc. There isn't a hypercard/programming aspect anymore buried under their tooling.

edit: actually it looks like wick can do the hypercard/flash programming too, which is sorta cool.

Distributing a Flash file was dead easy

Distributing a HTML file and its assets? God damn complex

> Distributing a HTML file and its assets? God damn complex

There's always Web Bundles[0], but I have no idea what the UX is like. I haven't heard about Web Bundles for a while, but they seem like such a good idea.

[0]: https://web.dev/web-bundles/

I think this is largely (entirely?) a failure of marketing on Adobe's part. I spoke to several people who created flash animations and games in the 2000s and they thought Flash-the-tool had died along with Flashplayer, they didn't know it had been rebranded Animate.

I think p5.js is emerging quickly among artists!

My recollection of Flash was it was just an annoyance. I remember avoiding flash websites with the exception being games. And I’m not a huge gamer but I recall a handful of flash games that stole a few days of attention from me. I always find it a bit odd when I hear people have positive nostalgic memories of flash because I had thought everyone equally agreed it was annoying: similar to Java applets, the Real Player, and actually many JavaScript things at the time.

However much Flash was abused on the web, it was an absolute joy to create games and animations with. There aren't any tools I know of today that allow for the same rapid art+animation+code workflows. I've tried using Canvas2D+JS as well as SVG+JS to do some of the same things, and they don't even come close to Flash!

Interesting account. I was diving into tech around turn off the millennia and I remember spending all of a day or so in action script and went back to the server side stuff. There’s so much game content around I have to believe the void is being met somewhere? Was this just an easy on ramp for low/no experienced folks? I believe that’s how the dreamweaver and other connected adobe products were positioned.

Yeah, it's really not. That entire segment that Flash games owned doesn't exist any more in the same way that it did.

The closest thing would be the mobile games like Candy Crush and Garden Saga, but even there the tide has passed, and it's too difficult to make anything - King was bought by Activision for 6 billion dollars.

There were several major indie games that started out in Flash and ended up on consoles. Alien Homind, N++, and Castle Crashers come to mind, in particular. They were pretty great games. Castle Crashers on Xbox 360 was a favorite of my roommates.

> That entire segment that Flash games owned doesn't exist any more in the same way that it did.

Really? Or did move to a platform like App Store/Steam. I’ve seen it quantified and there’s a absurd amount of new games posted daily. I won’t argue that the tools in use are easier or better than flash, but developers certainly pivoted or so it seems. From a laymen/consumer perspective, Browsing the App Store doesn’t feel much different that I remember Kongregate or some of the other big flash game sites of the past.

The Flash tool still exists, Adobe calls it Animate now. It exports to canvas/js.

The functionality isn't really the same. Yes, you can export animations, but it's much more difficult to provide the same level of interactive game that Flash did.

Either way, the death of AS3 was a sad thing.

One of the best languages ever made, imho.

Optional typing, e4x, normal inheritance (non-prototypal), etc...

The web would be a better place if AS3 took over instead of js (and I love js).

I imagine wasm would have shown up and been a ton easier to implement as well. AOT bits that are full static, JIT bits that aren't. No need for TypeScript, Flow, etc...

Especially sad since iirc Adobe donated the entire thing and was pushing for it to become standard in HTML4.

I think Flash died 2 years too early, or WebAssembly came 2 years too late. Because it always seemed to me that Flash was a good idea for the web, if it existed as a layer that was not "native" could be linked as a library (on top of Wasm and canvas). Alas, there were plans to emulate Flash using Wasm, but it was on its deathbed by the time we were starting the open design process. Adobe's VM seems to have had some design decisions that made it difficult to just "hit the button" and make it run decent on Wasm.

I think this can be laid at the feet of Apple.

I loved Jobs' vision of HTML5 being the app platform, and getting rid of flash.

Instead he got voted down, and we got the early death of flash with the replacement being a walled-garden app store, setting the web back for years.

They're starting to get their act together (I'm looking at you Web Push Notifications) but it's been a long, painful road.

Flash was huge for playful things because it was extremely accessible.

Say what you want about the underlying tech, the authoring tools were easy for a kind (like me, at the time) to pick up and make animations with.

Is there an equivalent for Canvas?

I think, fundamentally, delight and whimsy don't scale.

They are based on some element of surprise. Once the surprise is gone because you've seen it a few times, the joy evaporates and then it's just annoying.

I can understand where that sentiment comes from, but I think what really killed the playful flash web was accessibility. It's difficult enough to be fully accessible for a normal website; anything out of the ordinary is going to be significantly more difficult.

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