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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit sad that HyperCard was before my time, because if I had known about it as a kid I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have done anything else. I've played with it in emulators and it's pretty fun. I love early attempts at making programming accessible to people.

To a much lesser extent, I feel like Flash (the animation program, not the player) kind of gave me that feeling the first time I used it. Flash was so immediately approachable compared to trying to figure out something like C++ with OpenGL or SDL or something, and it was just downright fun to create things with it.

I've really not found anything since Flash that I've had as much fun developing in. Gamemaker is cool and still pretty fun, but I still don't feel like it's quite as streamlined and it doesn't give me the same "anything is possible" feeling Flash did. Maybe I'm just getting old.

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I still believe HyperCard is the most productive development environment for end user applications ever made.

And then there was Macromedia Director. Being in love with software has become such a rare experience these days.

It's hard to love software that is an organ of a remote rent-seeking entity which is free to change the software- or its terms of use- at any time.

Well thankfully the market has moved _well_ past that point. :|

We still use Chrome, don't we?

Where is the rent-seeking happening?

Charging for Photoshop as a SaaS product

Okay, but where's the rent seeking?

They could sell me Photoshop version 2024, and I could pay them $600, and just use that for the next 20 years. Instead, I'm being sold Photoshop: cloud edition for $50/month, for forever. I don't actually own my copy of Photoshop that I'm giving them money for, I'm renting it from them.

Photoshop is Adobe's product, so they get to charge for it however they please, but that's textbook rent-seeking. You could argue that they're improving Photoshop and deserve the rent, but what if I don't want those new features and I'm happy with Photoshop 2024, but regardless of that, I'm still only renting Photoshop (and the rest of the suite) from them these days.

Textbook rent-seeking is convincing a government official to make it law that people use your service. Rent-seeking isn't "charging rent" or "charging a subscription".

I don't really think it's that hard at all.

When I discovered Flash I was a literal child (12 years old), so it's not like I was reading license agreements regardless, but even if I were an adult, I could still enjoy the software simply because it's fun to use.

I certainly don't have many nice things to say about Adobe as a company, I hate that they moved to a subscription model, and I hate that they didn't open source Flash Player, guaranteeing an expiration date on the tech, but that really doesn't detract from how much I really enjoyed using the software.

There's a few causes I'd posit. We've gone through a number of tools now, and they all seem finite. We don't have time to just noodle around anymore. We have loads of other things to play with as well. And of course, life, obligations, etc; time is a rare commodity and you want to spend it on something you know you'll enjoy.

That said, last time I spent some time on just playing with software was with the Pico-8 virtual console and its intentionally constrained development tooling.

I will admit that Pico 8 is probably the most fun dev environment I've found since Flash. It doesn't give me the same "anything is possible" feeling Flash did, but that might just be because I'm more jaded and not a child anymore (as my quickly receding hairline keeps reminding me of!).

I do think that Flash was more fun for me just because it was "animation-first", instead of "programming first". It felt like I could easily make "real" cartoons, and then make a game out of it, instead of trying to bolt on a bunch of PNGs into a gaming framework. I know it wasn't for everyone, but for a kid like me, it was kind of magic.

Tangent, but was the difference between Shockwave, Flash and Shockwave Flash?

I remember that Shockwave came first and Flash followed. I also remember how the HDD would thrash whenever a website called on the Macromedia plug-in to be loaded. It would thrash with that, and with Java!

Unrelated technologies given the same name for marketing, like Java and JavaScript.

I never tried Director. Out of curiosity, what made you like it more than Flash? Genuine question.

When I was in college, my roommate (also a music student) and I would scream about how frustrated we were with Finale for notating out music.

Reading the [review and seeing GIF examples][1] of the workflow of Dorico music notation software made my jaw drop as a college student. I still want to brag to other people at work about the things I can do with it (and believe me, they do not care).

There's other software that delights me from time to time, but I've been using Dorico for probably five years now (took awhile after it came out for it to be ready for my day-to-day use) and I still can't believe music notation software can be this good.

[1]: https://www.scoringnotes.com/news/dorico-is-here-a-review/

If you're looking for digital interactives that are easy, you might like p5.js. https://p5js.org/

Flash went away faster than a replacement emerged. When Flash went away, it was very clear to me that if HTML5 at that time was the future and it's immediate replacement, we were screwed.

If you're looking for something that could build next, Flutter seems to be carrying on the promise of one codebase to run on everything similar to Flash.

The other techs that I'm bullish on and are still developing are WebAssembly, and to some degree Rust.

"Flash went away faster than a replacement emerged."

Not really how it looks to me: https://haxe.org/

I feel like Haxe is more of a replacement for Flex and Flash. I like Haxe, I think it's pretty neat, but Flash was cool to me because of the animation and drawing tools that I could later add code to.

Flex was cool because it gave you a more traditional framework for making Flash apps (XML-based layouts and forms and remoting stuff), but I found it only about 1/8th as fun as Flash, because it felt more like "boring" programming, which is still fun, just not as fun to me as drawing cartoons.

I mean, if you squint a little Haxe is just an ActionScript compiler that has more targets than Flash. So it's kind of close to Flash, though not perhaps as easy to use as that XML-based thing.

I don't think that P5 has direct integration with a drawing/animation tool does it?

I think what I liked about Flash was that it was a drawing/animation tool first, and there were easy ways to bolt things onto the drawings and animation. It was slow and Flash player had a lot of issues, but I don't think P5 is really a direct replacement for that.

Check out P5js and Processing, maybe those scratch the itch?

The joy of Flash was the ease of scripting alongside vector-based illustration with keyframe animations and audio (plus intuitive asset management, onion skinning etc. etc.). Flash was downright fun indeed!

Yeah, P5 and Processing are cool, I like them, but the part of Flash was so magical was that I sort of discovered the coding part.

I pirated a copy of Flash so I could draw dumb animations, I would then convert looping animations into movie clips, and then I sort of accidentally figured out that you can attach code to those movie clips, and then I figured out how to make basic games. None of my games were that impressive, but it was ridiculously fun for me.

I like P5, I've played with it, but the integration with the animation tool is what really made me love Flash. I miss it.

While these libraries are great, doing anything with them requires writing code. Hypercard was like PowerPoint, with a point and click GUI.

Check out Downpour - probably the closest modern thing to HyperCard to make fun clicky apps and games.

https://downpour.games/

But as I understand it, to make it actually do anything interesting you still had to write Hyperscript (wasn't it?) code.

You could set up simple interactions entirely via the GUI, like making buttons navigate to other cards.

HyperCard also came with an extensive set of stacks that contained premade buttons and fields with useful scripts, and you could copy and paste those objects into your own stacks or modify entire "template" stacks into customized applications without necessarily even looking at the scripts.

The general idea was to provide users with a smooth ramp: no code -> using someone else's code -> tweaking someone else's code -> writing your own code.

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