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I still remember playing with one of the first versions of Macromedia Flash as an intern at an IT company during high school. The "hot thing" back then that peo

I still remember playing with one of the first versions of Macromedia Flash as an intern at an IT company during high school. The "hot thing" back then that people mostly used Flash for was to realize cool "intro" sequences for their website. As an example, here's the intro that I made for my company (courtesy of the Wayback machine): https://web.archive.org/web/20030605160730/http://kimweb.de/flashframe.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20030605160730/http://kimweb.de/... Everything in Flash was pretty limited back then, for example Actionscript didn't even have sine and cosine functions! I remember that for another project of mine I ended up re-implementing these functions using a Taylor series approximation, which was pretty wild but worked. Today it seems that Flash gets a lot of hate and ridicule by the IT community, but honestly back in 2001 it was a huge deal and allowed you to do thing on the Web that were completely impossible using HTML/CSS (Java applets were an alternative but much clunkier and harder to create). One example of this was a small thing that I built which would allow you to specify some text as a parameter and then would let this text "fly in" using user-defined animation sequences. For example, you could have the letters "fly in" from above or perform some wave-like dance. Creating these animations could be done by defining a sub-tween (I might misremember the name for this) for each letter, which would take the letter value and position and perform the rendering, which was quite flexible and allowed for object-oriented use of animation sequences. So, even back then Flash was a pretty decent and versatile tool and probably had a large influence on later technologies like HTML5.

deleted 11y ago
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jliptzin 11y ago
I was making bank in high school (for a hs student) making those flash intros for people. Then I made a flash video of my teacher with her hair on fire and almost got expelled. Versatile technology indeed.
kaoD 11y ago
To be fair those things you couldn't do in the web, like intros and text fly-ins, were really obnoxious. That's what got Flash a lot of hate (and rightly so). What made Flash great were games, video, real-time communication (e.g. web chats) and cartoons. Flash was great as its own medium, even if embedded in the web (not replacing it). Shoehorning Flash into the web medium was a mistake, just as obnoxious as now is hijacking the scroll or adding thousands of fade-ins in HTML5 (which fortunately as a fad seems to be dying).
- fenomas 11y ago
  People forget though, web designers didn't start using Flash to replace the web for kicks - HTML sucked pretty hard as a visual medium in those days. Just getting a page to lay out similarly across NS/IE/mac/PC was a serious challenge, let alone getting the text to show up at the same size or in the same font, or scripts to run the same way, or having any kind of interactivity. Obviously HTML has always been the best medium for marked-up text, but for pages whose value came from interactivity or design, Flash was simply a better medium for a long time - its entire heyday plus 1-2 years beyond, IMO.
  - arbitrage 11y ago
    > Just getting a page to lay out similarly across NS/IE/mac/PC was a serious challenge, let alone getting the text to show up at the same size or in the same font, or scripts to run the same way, or having any kind of interactivity. Hardly the fault of HTML, a layout markup language. Put the blame where it's due, on a non-cooperative, or rather openly combative, market place.
    - fenomas 11y ago
      > Put the blame.. I was just trying to deflect the blame from Flash. ;) But yeah, HTML's woes were due to browsers not cooperating, but then until their lunch was getting eaten I don't suppose they had any incentive to. To me, the Story of the Open Web is one that validates both standardization and proprietary innovation, in that sense.
config_yml 11y ago
Flash was great for a lot of things 10 years ago that you couldn't to with HTML. Custom fonts? -> Flash Sound? -> Flash Text Shadow? -> Flash Dynamically blur images? -> Flash 3D? -> Flash (well, more like Director/Lingo back then) it took some time to reinvent the wheel with HTML. Once in a while I come across an HTML page with a "loading" screen... oh wait most, lot's of SPA do this… :) (edit: formatting)
- wnevets 11y ago
  Lets not forget the indy gaming scene. Before there was mobile gaming we had flash games.

deleted 11y ago

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jliptzin 11y ago

I was making bank in high school (for a hs student) making those flash intros for people. Then I made a flash video of my teacher with her hair on fire and almost got expelled. Versatile technology indeed.

kaoD 11y ago

To be fair those things you couldn't do in the web, like intros and text fly-ins, were really obnoxious. That's what got Flash a lot of hate (and rightly so). What made Flash great were games, video, real-time communication (e.g. web chats) and cartoons. Flash was great as its own medium, even if embedded in the web (not replacing it). Shoehorning Flash into the web medium was a mistake, just as obnoxious as now is hijacking the scroll or adding thousands of fade-ins in HTML5 (which fortunately as a fad seems to be dying).

fenomas 11y ago
People forget though, web designers didn't start using Flash to replace the web for kicks - HTML sucked pretty hard as a visual medium in those days. Just getting a page to lay out similarly across NS/IE/mac/PC was a serious challenge, let alone getting the text to show up at the same size or in the same font, or scripts to run the same way, or having any kind of interactivity. Obviously HTML has always been the best medium for marked-up text, but for pages whose value came from interactivity or design, Flash was simply a better medium for a long time - its entire heyday plus 1-2 years beyond, IMO.
- arbitrage 11y ago
  > Just getting a page to lay out similarly across NS/IE/mac/PC was a serious challenge, let alone getting the text to show up at the same size or in the same font, or scripts to run the same way, or having any kind of interactivity. Hardly the fault of HTML, a layout markup language. Put the blame where it's due, on a non-cooperative, or rather openly combative, market place.
  - fenomas 11y ago
    > Put the blame.. I was just trying to deflect the blame from Flash. ;) But yeah, HTML's woes were due to browsers not cooperating, but then until their lunch was getting eaten I don't suppose they had any incentive to. To me, the Story of the Open Web is one that validates both standardization and proprietary innovation, in that sense.

config_yml 11y ago

Flash was great for a lot of things 10 years ago that you couldn't to with HTML. Custom fonts? -> Flash Sound? -> Flash Text Shadow? -> Flash Dynamically blur images? -> Flash 3D? -> Flash (well, more like Director/Lingo back then) it took some time to reinvent the wheel with HTML. Once in a while I come across an HTML page with a "loading" screen... oh wait most, lot's of SPA do this… :) (edit: formatting)

wnevets 11y ago
Lets not forget the indy gaming scene. Before there was mobile gaming we had flash games.