Something was lost in the internet culture. Flash was the language of web art. I don't know what is the new language for that anymore.
If anyone knows, please do tell me. WebGL? Any WebGL-powered framework? What is it?
Flash was the most attention grabbing medium at the time (because of bandwidth constraints), and making money was not the expectation, so the two groups flocked together and created all those wonderful animations and games for free. I don't see Flash, or anything like it, winning against TikTok and app store cash grabs anytime soon.
[1] Exhibit A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN92RC0Lmd4 . Distinct visual style? Check. Absurdist? Check. High effort? Check. Niche? Currently 3k views, check. Available for free? Check. 15 years ago this would be on Newgrounds.
[2] Exhibit B: https://play.google.com/store/games . Hundreds of thousands of simple games. 15 years ago, the less greedy version of this would be on Kongregate.
The difference with Flash was that it was usually the work of a solo developer of a very small team, so they could be unique in what they made (not dismissing that Flash game had clones too). The mobile app landscape is different in that conformity = $$$. These apps are soulless, they have no incentive to build something that's not a Clash of Clans / Temple Run / Candy Crush type game that's inundated with microtransactions.
OK, now that we've all calmed back down, VB6 has been unmatched in the way that it allowed someone with zero experience to drag-and-drop and write in what looks like pseudocode to get some little business widget built. Yes, you can engineer something with better architecture that's less likely to paint you into a `DoEvents()` corner. Yes, the mere existence of settings like `On Error Resume Next`, `Option Strict Off`, and `Option Explicit Off` are anathema to correctness, security (lol), and robustness. No, if you expect support for Unicode or 64-bit operations, it wasn't built for that.
Many people loathe Flash for its security vulnerabilities, or VB6 because of experiences with poorly-written code at businesses that should have had a 'real programmer.' And today, a tool that made the same design decisions that Flash and VB6 did - pandering to novices who weren't willing to go to the effort to do things right - would be derided as a toy, as unusable for real work outside of sandboxed demos. But both were instrumental as stepping stones in the early 2000s to transform non-computer-literate individuals and businesses into creators and users.
With Flash, you could just follow some tutorials and make something nice in no time, fully understanding what you're doing.
Flash didn't "lean into" Flex. Flex was an Eclipse-based IDE and a set of libraries that some people used for some projects. It was specifically aimed at building apps. There were layouts, controls and all that. There was a list view with cell reuse, in 2008! It was much more like Android layout system then what the web had and still has. Flex was a tool that's very good for some jobs and completely unfit for others — like any other tool, really.
Nothing. Flash left a gaping void in Internet creativity that has gone unfilled. We don't call it 'art' anymore, we call it 'content', aka grist for walled-garden mills of Youtube and Instagram and Tiktok.
P5, which while excellent and better than flash for many reasons it’s not the same thing.
The true beauty of flash was seeing the cool games and animations online a kid could pirate a copy of flash and then the way the tech worked it lulled you in with simple animation tools but you were forced to interact with code to control the play state.
This meant a percentage dug deeper and could eventually make games and more advanced things.
>function draw() {
> stroke(50);
> fill(100);
> ellipse(x, y, 24, 24); }
In Flash you would just click the Oval icon and draw one.
Both have their benefits, P5 is far superior for creating interactive digital art or creative tooling. Flash is far better at creating intricate animations.
Wick editor is nice, but developement is on hold. It is open source, so maybe something will still come out if it.