6 ms·

The question is, do any of the existing web stacks come close to the beginner friendly aspects of the original flash? I don't think so.. I can imagine any of m

The question is, do any of the existing web stacks come close to the beginner friendly aspects of the original flash? I don't think so.. I can imagine any of my musician friends installing $FRAMEWORK and building a web site full of their own animations, menu's, and music playback.. Flash for all its "evilness" still IMHO hasn't been matched.

code_duck 9y ago
The authoring software was user friendly but sites made that way were atrocious in terms of usability in every way possible. Slow loading and also everything else about a browser didn't work as expected - bookmarking, back button, cut and paste, open in new window were all broken in flash sites. I don't think that it's laudable to create a tool that empowers beginners to create useless and difficult websites.
- BatFastard 9y ago
  Indeed, lets condemn everyone who creates easy to use and powerful tools! I think everyone prefers pain in the ass tools and don't do much, this is the best way to protect the holy order of coders. Long live shitty tools!!!
  - kbenson 9y ago
    > Indeed, lets condemn everyone who creates easy to use and powerful tools! Easy to use, powerful and proprietary. As a consumer, flash sites were often horrible. Get a few minutes into using it, find out that there's a bug keeping you from advancing any farther in exploration and your task, so you need to reload. Oh good, you have to start from scratch again because it's not actually using URLs to keep track of your location. Want to know how to find a manual on a manufacturer's site? Oh, good, they used flash, so their site isn't indexed correctly by any search engines, and you have to navigate their poor idea of what made a good UI in 1995. Flash was good for media delivery. For everything else, it just broke how the web was expected to work.
  - hobs 9y ago
    Yeah, its great when no one can index the content, no one with disabilities can see the content, the UI follows no conventions, sounds blares at you for you to slap the monkey, and is a huge security hole! I get where you are coming from, but being snide when supporting something that was misused so badly is a bit one sided. Excel is great and has enabled millions of people to accomplish things that expensive coders were previously needed for (and that was a net good) but when misused these things can cause terrible problems[0]. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-18/faq-reinhart-rogoff-and-the-excel-error-that-changed-history https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-18/faq-reinh...
    - lokedhs 9y ago
      When I read your first sentence, I honestly believed that you were describing the current, flash-less, world. I readily agree that Flash was horrible, but none of the things you mentioned has improved with the demise of Flash, at all.
      - code_duck 9y ago
        When I read some of these comments, i get the feeling people aren't aware of the extent of the technical shortcomings of flash circa 2005. Of course indexing has improved since the demise of flash, compared to the heyday of flash. Flash contained all text in an unindexable binary blob. Accessibility was very poor since, again, flash prevented the use of any browser features for that without offering its own. Flash was also a leading security hole for years.
      - matt4077 9y ago
        Despite all the complaining, the situation today is a vast improvement over the internet ca. 2000 or so. Just a few points: - There are four different browser engines, but no website ever asks you to install a different one (except some Google Cloud stuff tsktsktsk) - You can develop a complex javascript application and, at the very end, discover that it works in all browsers. - You can develop a complex javascript application - seriously, this point needs repetition. In the past I'd spend more than half of the time trying to get something working at least in both firefox and IE, with the fix for A frequently braking B... - websites cannot open 100 popups, maximise the window etc. - almost all websites are usable on screens of every size (flash liked to insist on, for example, 800x600. which almost never was the right size) - Even worse than Flash: Java Applets, Active-X. Seeing a Swing UI today is like a reunion with your childhood tormentor after you've succeeded in life and he has three marriages and a stint in jail behind him: you still have vivid memories of the pain, but it can no longer hurt you. - Most important: Flash broke everything that makes the web a web. It was simply a delivery platform for binaries with URIs. No links, no way to spider content, access limited to the select platforms Adobe felt like supporting etc.
  - code_duck 9y ago
    Powerful tools to do useless or harmful things aren't helping anyone.
- dyarosla 9y ago
  As a counterargument, look at the state of the web today without Flash. Many websites are still bloated, still slow to load, still hijack the back button, still mess with copy and paste, still force same-window-only opening. So was Flash really the issue?
  - pcurve 9y ago
    I blame unnecessary frameworks and engineering exercises for the bloat. In no other country, is software IT so big. So much technology for technology sake.
  - code_duck 9y ago
    With the flash sites i refer to, the back and forward buttons didn't work at all. Slow to load today is nothing like loading a 1 mb flash app over dialup on a 800mhz pentium iii. I mean copy and paste, like back and forward, were not just l 'messed with'... you often couldn't even highlight text. Flash sites were far worse than the average awful HTML site of 2004, and this is why they're now almost totally dead. Sure, the real problem is the people who made poor decisions and made sites like that in the first place, and still do.
    - fenomas 9y ago
      This blame is misplaced. Flash was never designed for full websites and developers at the time knew that perfectly well - nobody was making a design decision to disable the back button. The reality is just that HTML in those early days was grim - IE and Netscape were making up tags willy-nilly, and any kind of interactivity or media playback was nigh-impossible to achieve without plugins. (Even for static layouts it could be a significant challenge to make things work the same way across browsers and platforms.) So the result was, for interactive media-driven sites, developers used Flash outside the bounds of what it was meant for, and the back button broke. The alternative wasn't to not break the back button, the alternative was having a big "This site only works in Netscape!" banner, or having no interactivity at all.
      - code_duck 9y ago
freehunter 9y ago
Similarly, Visual Basic. Has anything since allowed non-programmers to build a GUI as easily as that? Just drag and drop, then double click the button and follow the on-screen prompts to glue it all together. It gets a lot of shit from real developers, but what can match it?
- orionblastar 9y ago
  I did Visual Basic and MS Access programming mostly in the late 1990s. Upscaling to SQL Server when the database grew too large etc. IBM OS/2 had a Parts Workbench that was easier than Visual Basic and Borland had Delphi based on Object Pascal. Ruby on Rails comes close and Python is the new Visual Basic for a new generation of programmers now.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    Rails and Python are fine, I've used both of them extensively, but they are no comparison to VB in any way. Sure they're easy enough to use, but it's all 100% pure code. The biggest benefit of VB was the interface was not coded, it was drawn. There's no way to do that with Rails or Python.
    - orionblastar 9y ago
      That sounds like a startup idea. Make ROR and Python have an IDE as easy to use as the VB IDE.
- TsomArp 9y ago
  Delphi.
  - detaro 9y ago
    And it's Open Source "brother", Lazarus.
- theamk 9y ago
  C#
chuckdries 9y ago
There's an app on mac called "hype" that does a decent job with layout, animation, and basic interactivity in HTML5, but I agree we need good WYSIWYG tools. That being said, Flash definitely had a learning curve that wasn't entirely trivial. So much of the javascript community seems focused on using JS for the really big applications and large scale stuff these days, but I think it'd be nice if innovation were happening in accessibility and tooling for light programmers. Light programmers is my idea of people who want to build basic functionality but not huge applications and may not be formally trained or have any experience programming, like how small and medium businesses used Flash for cheesy website animation back in the day. There's a lot of overhead knowledge needed to create in HTML/CSS/JS, and a lot of the beginner tutorials feel like they assume you're intending to become a web dev. There's more tooling and better libraries for JS today than ever before, but these things are hard for beginners. Stuff like webpack is great but it seems like the focus is in that space. You could argue that the high complexity large application space is where the focus needs to be, and where js is at its weakest, but I can't help but feel like we could do better. The best thing (imo) for beginners using JS (who don't intend to continue learning to become a developer) is JQuery. Yeah people abuse it but it does simplify basic animation stuff for inexperienced developers. End rant I guess?

code_duck 9y ago

The authoring software was user friendly but sites made that way were atrocious in terms of usability in every way possible. Slow loading and also everything else about a browser didn't work as expected - bookmarking, back button, cut and paste, open in new window were all broken in flash sites. I don't think that it's laudable to create a tool that empowers beginners to create useless and difficult websites.

BatFastard 9y ago
Indeed, lets condemn everyone who creates easy to use and powerful tools! I think everyone prefers pain in the ass tools and don't do much, this is the best way to protect the holy order of coders. Long live shitty tools!!!
- kbenson 9y ago
  > Indeed, lets condemn everyone who creates easy to use and powerful tools! Easy to use, powerful and proprietary. As a consumer, flash sites were often horrible. Get a few minutes into using it, find out that there's a bug keeping you from advancing any farther in exploration and your task, so you need to reload. Oh good, you have to start from scratch again because it's not actually using URLs to keep track of your location. Want to know how to find a manual on a manufacturer's site? Oh, good, they used flash, so their site isn't indexed correctly by any search engines, and you have to navigate their poor idea of what made a good UI in 1995. Flash was good for media delivery. For everything else, it just broke how the web was expected to work.
- hobs 9y ago
  Yeah, its great when no one can index the content, no one with disabilities can see the content, the UI follows no conventions, sounds blares at you for you to slap the monkey, and is a huge security hole! I get where you are coming from, but being snide when supporting something that was misused so badly is a bit one sided. Excel is great and has enabled millions of people to accomplish things that expensive coders were previously needed for (and that was a net good) but when misused these things can cause terrible problems[0]. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-18/faq-reinhart-rogoff-and-the-excel-error-that-changed-history https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-18/faq-reinh...
  - lokedhs 9y ago
    When I read your first sentence, I honestly believed that you were describing the current, flash-less, world. I readily agree that Flash was horrible, but none of the things you mentioned has improved with the demise of Flash, at all.
    - code_duck 9y ago
      When I read some of these comments, i get the feeling people aren't aware of the extent of the technical shortcomings of flash circa 2005. Of course indexing has improved since the demise of flash, compared to the heyday of flash. Flash contained all text in an unindexable binary blob. Accessibility was very poor since, again, flash prevented the use of any browser features for that without offering its own. Flash was also a leading security hole for years.
    - matt4077 9y ago
      Despite all the complaining, the situation today is a vast improvement over the internet ca. 2000 or so. Just a few points: - There are four different browser engines, but no website ever asks you to install a different one (except some Google Cloud stuff tsktsktsk) - You can develop a complex javascript application and, at the very end, discover that it works in all browsers. - You can develop a complex javascript application - seriously, this point needs repetition. In the past I'd spend more than half of the time trying to get something working at least in both firefox and IE, with the fix for A frequently braking B... - websites cannot open 100 popups, maximise the window etc. - almost all websites are usable on screens of every size (flash liked to insist on, for example, 800x600. which almost never was the right size) - Even worse than Flash: Java Applets, Active-X. Seeing a Swing UI today is like a reunion with your childhood tormentor after you've succeeded in life and he has three marriages and a stint in jail behind him: you still have vivid memories of the pain, but it can no longer hurt you. - Most important: Flash broke everything that makes the web a web. It was simply a delivery platform for binaries with URIs. No links, no way to spider content, access limited to the select platforms Adobe felt like supporting etc.
- code_duck 9y ago
  Powerful tools to do useless or harmful things aren't helping anyone.
dyarosla 9y ago
As a counterargument, look at the state of the web today without Flash. Many websites are still bloated, still slow to load, still hijack the back button, still mess with copy and paste, still force same-window-only opening. So was Flash really the issue?
- pcurve 9y ago
  I blame unnecessary frameworks and engineering exercises for the bloat. In no other country, is software IT so big. So much technology for technology sake.
- code_duck 9y ago
  With the flash sites i refer to, the back and forward buttons didn't work at all. Slow to load today is nothing like loading a 1 mb flash app over dialup on a 800mhz pentium iii. I mean copy and paste, like back and forward, were not just l 'messed with'... you often couldn't even highlight text. Flash sites were far worse than the average awful HTML site of 2004, and this is why they're now almost totally dead. Sure, the real problem is the people who made poor decisions and made sites like that in the first place, and still do.
  - fenomas 9y ago
    This blame is misplaced. Flash was never designed for full websites and developers at the time knew that perfectly well - nobody was making a design decision to disable the back button. The reality is just that HTML in those early days was grim - IE and Netscape were making up tags willy-nilly, and any kind of interactivity or media playback was nigh-impossible to achieve without plugins. (Even for static layouts it could be a significant challenge to make things work the same way across browsers and platforms.) So the result was, for interactive media-driven sites, developers used Flash outside the bounds of what it was meant for, and the back button broke. The alternative wasn't to not break the back button, the alternative was having a big "This site only works in Netscape!" banner, or having no interactivity at all.
    - code_duck 9y ago

freehunter 9y ago

Similarly, Visual Basic. Has anything since allowed non-programmers to build a GUI as easily as that? Just drag and drop, then double click the button and follow the on-screen prompts to glue it all together. It gets a lot of shit from real developers, but what can match it?

orionblastar 9y ago
I did Visual Basic and MS Access programming mostly in the late 1990s. Upscaling to SQL Server when the database grew too large etc. IBM OS/2 had a Parts Workbench that was easier than Visual Basic and Borland had Delphi based on Object Pascal. Ruby on Rails comes close and Python is the new Visual Basic for a new generation of programmers now.
- freehunter 9y ago
  Rails and Python are fine, I've used both of them extensively, but they are no comparison to VB in any way. Sure they're easy enough to use, but it's all 100% pure code. The biggest benefit of VB was the interface was not coded, it was drawn. There's no way to do that with Rails or Python.
  - orionblastar 9y ago
    That sounds like a startup idea. Make ROR and Python have an IDE as easy to use as the VB IDE.
TsomArp 9y ago
Delphi.
- detaro 9y ago
  And it's Open Source "brother", Lazarus.
theamk 9y ago
C#

chuckdries 9y ago

There's an app on mac called "hype" that does a decent job with layout, animation, and basic interactivity in HTML5, but I agree we need good WYSIWYG tools. That being said, Flash definitely had a learning curve that wasn't entirely trivial. So much of the javascript community seems focused on using JS for the really big applications and large scale stuff these days, but I think it'd be nice if innovation were happening in accessibility and tooling for light programmers. Light programmers is my idea of people who want to build basic functionality but not huge applications and may not be formally trained or have any experience programming, like how small and medium businesses used Flash for cheesy website animation back in the day. There's a lot of overhead knowledge needed to create in HTML/CSS/JS, and a lot of the beginner tutorials feel like they assume you're intending to become a web dev. There's more tooling and better libraries for JS today than ever before, but these things are hard for beginners. Stuff like webpack is great but it seems like the focus is in that space. You could argue that the high complexity large application space is where the focus needs to be, and where js is at its weakest, but I can't help but feel like we could do better. The best thing (imo) for beginners using JS (who don't intend to continue learning to become a developer) is JQuery. Yeah people abuse it but it does simplify basic animation stuff for inexperienced developers. End rant I guess?