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The thing about Flash was that it was pretty WYSIWYG and a lot of creative people flocked to it because it had strong multimedia capabilities. Personally I kind

by dep_b 8y ago

The thing about Flash was that it was pretty WYSIWYG and a lot of creative people flocked to it because it had strong multimedia capabilities. Personally I kind of missed the part where you could build really nice looking stuff without much technical expertise, nowadays you need to know all about CSS, Polyfills and JS quirks so there's always this limitation where you have to understand pretty technical stuff early on to get something done. Flash was more like using Premiere where you just edited your timeline with a bit of interactivity sprinkled over it, no movie editor ever had to get his hands dirty with some kind of scripting language or low level file formats just to edit a movie. I had a lot of "oh wow" moments at the end of the 90's and beginning of the 00's with Flash. It was like the web was warped into the future. Nowadays you can achieve the same but not as elegant. It kind of reminds me of how PC's had to catch up with the Amiga for years. Perhaps starting with Wing Commander things were really on par or better, almost 8 years later.

basch 8y ago
Flash Professional still exists (renamed Animate CC) and outputs to Canvas, WebGL, and Flash/AIR. https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html I agree with you that it's a little sad that amateur animation fell a bit out of vogue, but the tools are right there for anyone whos interested to pick up.
- fipar 8y ago
  > I agree with you that it's a little sad that amateur animation fell a bit out of vogue, but the tools are right there for anyone whos interested to pick up. I have memories of being wowed by what creative people could do with flash in the 90s and I would not call that amateur animation. I think the problem (1) is we currently seem to be lacking in tools that let people skilled in the visual arts create things without knowledge of the mechanics, so to speak. It's like if in order to write a great song someone would first have to understand how a musical instrument is built. I would not call Amanda Palmer or Lee Ranaldo amateur yet I bet they probably can't build their own instruments. (1) I must make the disclaimer that for a couple of decades already I've been working only on the backend, so I may surely be missing part of the picture here. Edit: Fixed footnote mark.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    To be fair, there were reasons those things fell out of favor; there was a real tendency for crazy, uneditable code that was way larger than it needed to be. Perhaps some of these things would be less of an issue now (honestly, a bunch of wasteful code is less of an issue now than when most of us were on 56k modems), but they weren't made-up.
    - fipar 8y ago
      Absolutely, my first link was 2400 so I know exactly what you mean :) And I know there are still issues. Given today's speed, issues are more about security and accessibility. My point was just that the artists using flash to create good content were not amateur animators. Edit: My point was wrong as it was based on a misunderstanding of the use of the word 'amateur' by the person I was replying to.
      - bitwize 8y ago
        The only good content in Flash was games and animations (like Homestar Runner). If you were using Flash as a Web/application design tool, you weren't making good content. You were making a pain in my ass.
        kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
        Still waiting here for ADP and weather.gov to get their shit together and enter the 21st century.
        gbear605 8y ago
        What Flash content does weather.gov have? Their website visually appears a bit outdated, but it works just fine.
        kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
        The looping radar views use flash [1] [2]. The composite regional radar loops don't though [3]. That is unfortunate because the former has more information and detail. There's no reason why it can't be reimplemented with canvas or SVG to manage the overlays. [1] https://radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid=buf&product=N0R&overlay=11101111&loop=no https://radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid=buf&product=N0R&over... [2] https://radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid=BUF&product=N0R&overlay=11101111&loop=yes https://radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid=BUF&product=N0R&over... [3] https://radar.weather.gov/Conus/northeast_loop.php https://radar.weather.gov/Conus/northeast_loop.php
- bpicolo 8y ago
  I suspect a lot of early internet amateur animators got started on pirated/shared versions of Flash. Probably helped the proliferation of that scene a whole lot. Cloud based service models make that much harder.
  - basch 8y ago
    $20.99 for all of creative suite is also a much lower entry point price.
    - bpicolo 8y ago
      12-14 year olds aren't going to be dropping 250 bucks a year. If you look at something like newgrounds, a lot of that was bored teenagers.
    - kitsunesoba 8y ago
      Things may have changed for today’s teens, but having been a teen through the 00’s that would’ve been too expensive for me. It was hard to even justify a WoW subscription at $15/month even with the near endless entertainment value that provided. Also, with the CC subscription setup, if you stop paying you lose access to your creations. That’s not too big of a deal for working adults, but for a teen with tumultuous cash flow, it’s a huge dealbreaker. I spent hundreds of hours in Photoshop as a teen, but I likely would’ve have bothered with it at all if it weren’t easily piratable.
    - molmalo 8y ago
      Depends on where you live in this World. For young people here (south america) that could be a lot. That's a problem generally with cloud services. Pricing is mostly done considering some countries and contexts, but totally ignoring other. With physical equivalents some years ago, local distributors made deals with their home offices to adjust for this, but that's not something usually done anymore.
jonplackett 8y ago
Totally agree with this! I miss the simple days of build once run anywhere and just being able to bash out a fun idea in an afternoon and release it and know everyone would have the same experience. Yeah security was crap with flash but surely that could have been solved. I think the battery use and apple’s desire to make sure everything had to go through their paid AppStore was what killed it really though.
- jonplackett 8y ago
  I wish adobe would make a flash-like interface that output html5 / JavaScript / css
  - mhenr18 8y ago
    Their current Animate product (they renamed Flash Pro) is pretty much what you're looking for, if I'm not mistaken.
  - vturner 8y ago
    When Steve Jobs and company effectively killed "RIAs" I remember Adobe pivoting and promising a software to do what they previously had but output HTML5/CSS/JSS instead of Flash. It looks like it is still alive in the form of Adobe Animate?
    - bdcravens 8y ago
      The product was originally called Adobe Edge, and it was rolled into Adobe Animate.
      - nostalgeek 8y ago
        > The product was originally called Adobe Edge, and it was rolled into Adobe Animate. Not Adobe Edge was killed dead, it was not rolled into Adobe Animate. Edge did export animation with jQuery and DOM element, while Adobe Animate exports animations in pure canvas.
  - 8y ago
steveklabnik 8y ago
Yes; as I said in the post, I focused mostly on implementor's needs here. When I eventually do a user comparison, this is a huge pro for Flash.
code_duck 8y ago
To me, flash was like the past, or a warped vision of the distant future. The interfaces people created had visual appeal, but that’s all they had. It lacked all of the usability that I was used to finding on webpages, and therefore made for a very frustrating experience. No bookmarking, no back and forward, no right clicking to open a new tab, frequent superfluous sound, major security holes, long loading times. I would hardly call any of this elegant. As a user, I was thrilled when people stopped using flash. Flash was like using poor quality native apps, which was a step backwards from a browser.
- gameswithgo 8y ago
  flash used to make websites was garbage, but used to make games that run in the browser it was very nice.
  - neospice 8y ago
    It seems the trend was that it was nice for makers, not so much for users.
    - izacus 8y ago
      Which, ironically, is the case with modern Electron apps and bloated JavaScript UI frameworks as well.
      - balfirevic 8y ago
        I'm a user of several Electron apps and they are very nice for me too.
        weiming 8y ago
        Electron (or embedded Chromium, etc.) is lazy development: save time on cross-platform work at the expense of your users' CPU overhead/battery time/SSD life. Spend time watching some of each year's WWDC talks and noting how much effort Apple engineers give to fine-tune certain APIs to enable app developers to optimize battery use, disk access, or graphics rendering. State-of the art stuff. And then your Electron app just ignores all of that.
gameswithgo 8y ago
The time is ripe for someone to recreate something like Flash the builds to WASM
- pier25 8y ago
  Adobe has Animate CC, which is basically Flash Pro with a new name that also outputs to JS, canvas, and webgl. I think it's very probable it will implement WASM in the future.
tjoff 8y ago
Well, you could run flash in webassembly and get all that back. But it would still come with many of the drawbacks.
- nostalgeek 8y ago
  https://github.com/mozilla/shumway https://github.com/mozilla/shumway is supposed to be an implementation of the Flash VM in typescript, But it can't even run in latest Firefox browser anymore apparently and no commits from 2 years.
jhabdas 8y ago
Macromedia Flash keyframe animation was great even for technical users who didn't know animation. However, as soon as you wanted any kind of interactivity you had to start learning a new scripting language and that was painful for everyone.
- nostalgeek 8y ago
  > Macromedia Flash keyframe animation was great even for technical users who didn't know animation. However, as soon as you wanted any kind of interactivity you had to start learning a new scripting language and that was painful for everyone. Not really. Action Script has always been close to Javascript/JScript.Net and now Typescript, it is the same syntax. In fact ActionScript 3 was supposed to be the template for ECMASCRIPT 4, before it was abandoned.
sureaboutthis 8y ago
Flash is an application. WebAssembly is a compiler. Not the same thing.
reaperducer 8y ago
I had a lot of "oh wow" moments at the end of the 90's and beginning of the 00's with Flash. A lot of users did, too. But it was usually along the lines of "Oh, wow. This page has flash. Well, I guess I'll go get a Coke while the Flash plugin loads into the browser and my computer can't go anything else. If I'm lucky, the whole thing won't crash and take all my work with it by the time I get back." We romanticize the past.
- Angostura 8y ago
  Maybe they just wanted to play with splendid stuff like http://wordperhect.e-2.org http://wordperhect.e-2.org
- larntz 8y ago
  You know what was worse than that? Embedded RealPlayer.
  - rhizome 8y ago
    I get enough "buffering..." spinners these days that RealPlayer jokes are in danger of being re-evaluated.
- kalleboo 8y ago
  I never had those issues with Flash. Just low framerates and long loading spinners for the bigger animations. Java applets OTOH had the exact experience you describe. Those were absolutely terrible.
dopeboy 8y ago
I agree. In the early 2000s, I learned about animation through Flash. I remember working on a 9th grade project that I illustrated through Flash. I remember learning what frames were, what keyframes were, what vectors were, etc. It was just the right amount of non-technical for me to make sense of it. Taking a step back, man what a different world it was back then. I'd fire up MS Frontpage or Macromedia Dreamweaver and go to town. The expectations have changed on the maintainability, usability, and functionality parts so I understand why we are where we are today. Both I do miss those simple days.
- jackcviers3 8y ago
  Flash was much more than animation. ActionScript was a fantastic language for developing dynamic client guis in. Flex's component based model was way better than what we have now -- basically typed webcomponents with a consistent runtime, and mxmlc and mxml was open source. Actionscript 3 was a fine language, with types and a nice compiler to work with. Steve Jobs and browser security holes killed Flash, and no current open web platform covers all the use cases mxml and AS3 covered for cross-browser development. I could analyze audio channels, run lightweight process concurrency via green-threading, store user files, do i81n translation, streaming websockets and work with actual binary data types in the browser in 2006. I could trigger actions based on events in video and audio streams. I had consistently applied css with animations across components in 2006. I had reusable web components in 206. It's now 2018 and we still don't have cross-browser support for all of that. Oh, and I could run my app on the desktop in offline mode and in the browser. Security was an issue. Looking back now, I think an Android-like permissions scheme is what it, and the browser, needs to fulfill the promise of write once run anywhere that the browser and the web tends to make.
  - pixelbath 8y ago
    >Actionscript 3 was a fine language It was heavily based off ES5, which really helped launch my Javascript abilities forward at the time. I was sad to see it go and ended up working with other technology that never felt as fun. I remembered recently that Haxe was initially based off of MTASC (something I used in the later AS3 days), and checked it out. It's quite a stable ecosystem that feels very familiar in syntax. Add in HaxeFlixel, and it's almost like Flash never left.
lev99 8y ago
Any reason why we cannot build a WYSIWYG editor as a high level WebAssembly language?
sbjs 8y ago
Kind of makes me wonder if there's a market for a React.js editor that works a lot like the Web Inspector does right now, where you can build your hierarchy as a nested list, set properties of each layer through a table, "wire" properties through several layers of hierarchy to reach further down components, and reference functions easily in the table. As long as it has support for lifecycle methods, it feels like it could become a natural UI for writing React apps!
bitwize 8y ago
Flash was indeed a tool for cultural creatives. You can tell because it only ever worked properly under Internet Explorer for Mac OS Classic. On every other browser/platform combo, there were framerate issues and the audio would gradually desync from the video. Forget about seeing these issues resolved in the afterthought of a Linux port.
- dep_b 8y ago
  Hehe yes I remember putting silent audio loops in Flash animations so the FPS wouldn't drift too much.
stefs 8y ago
i once (~15 years ago) worked at a web design shop where the founders were both architects. they did everything in flash as it somewhat resembled the tools they knew - cad software. one of them was the designer and he was really good and they made amazing websites without even knowing a shred of html or even programming languages (they didn't even use actionscript). in case the customer wanted a guestbook they used a free ad-supported one (until i joined as a programmer). flash was a good tool for the websites they used to create, usually graphics and animation heavy websites low on interactivity. they used the export function to generate the swf including the html index page to embed it. over the years focus shifted more and more to dynamic websites with content generated from databases and they were mostly lost there. dynamic content (loaded by http requests from databases) in flash usually turned into a huge pain in the ass after a while. for those projects we switched to a traditional website model where dynamic content mostly wasn't loaded into flash, instead it was a html-by-php website where flash animations replaced header jpegs (i.e. animated passive content). so, in our case, flash was a good replacement for animated and slightly interactive but not dynamically generated content.
techsin101 8y ago
In 2007 flash could run 3d games, do shaders, have multiplayer, run physics manipulation, have 3d sound, do bitmap manipulation, socket programming, and had documentation built into the editor. Even now html/J's can't do all of the things and most of the things that you can do, are not as fast. While browsers are stuck with legacies to uphold. Flash had no dom to worry about, untyped language (as3) or had css holding it back. General argument was flash sucks because people make terrible content with it. Which is like saying I hate having hands because I trip things over.. so no limbs = no mess PERFECT. In turn I think it helped push native apps. Since plain Js/html app just sucked in comparison when it comes to experience and capabilities. Flash should have been open sourced. Hopefully with webgl and web assembly someone can step in and create something similar
- blitmap 8y ago
  I think the key thing to keep in mind is that Flash gave you all of that from one vendor in a coherent, easy to make use of experience. We can certainly do the same things with JS and the technologies we have outside Flash, but it takes a lot of mental work to stitch it all together. You have to know so many frameworks. You have to know the type of frameworks you're looking for to do `x`. And then there's a lot of performance tuning because something done through canvas isn't as fast as something done with the DOM, etc. Flash was gross but useful.

by dep_b 8y ago

basch 8y ago

Flash Professional still exists (renamed Animate CC) and outputs to Canvas, WebGL, and Flash/AIR. https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html I agree with you that it's a little sad that amateur animation fell a bit out of vogue, but the tools are right there for anyone whos interested to pick up.

fipar 8y ago
> I agree with you that it's a little sad that amateur animation fell a bit out of vogue, but the tools are right there for anyone whos interested to pick up. I have memories of being wowed by what creative people could do with flash in the 90s and I would not call that amateur animation. I think the problem (1) is we currently seem to be lacking in tools that let people skilled in the visual arts create things without knowledge of the mechanics, so to speak. It's like if in order to write a great song someone would first have to understand how a musical instrument is built. I would not call Amanda Palmer or Lee Ranaldo amateur yet I bet they probably can't build their own instruments. (1) I must make the disclaimer that for a couple of decades already I've been working only on the backend, so I may surely be missing part of the picture here. Edit: Fixed footnote mark.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  To be fair, there were reasons those things fell out of favor; there was a real tendency for crazy, uneditable code that was way larger than it needed to be. Perhaps some of these things would be less of an issue now (honestly, a bunch of wasteful code is less of an issue now than when most of us were on 56k modems), but they weren't made-up.
  - fipar 8y ago
    Absolutely, my first link was 2400 so I know exactly what you mean :) And I know there are still issues. Given today's speed, issues are more about security and accessibility. My point was just that the artists using flash to create good content were not amateur animators. Edit: My point was wrong as it was based on a misunderstanding of the use of the word 'amateur' by the person I was replying to.
    - bitwize 8y ago
      The only good content in Flash was games and animations (like Homestar Runner). If you were using Flash as a Web/application design tool, you weren't making good content. You were making a pain in my ass.
      - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
        Still waiting here for ADP and weather.gov to get their shit together and enter the 21st century.
        gbear605 8y ago
        What Flash content does weather.gov have? Their website visually appears a bit outdated, but it works just fine.
        kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
        The looping radar views use flash [1] [2]. The composite regional radar loops don't though [3]. That is unfortunate because the former has more information and detail. There's no reason why it can't be reimplemented with canvas or SVG to manage the overlays. [1] https://radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid=buf&product=N0R&overlay=11101111&loop=no https://radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid=buf&product=N0R&over... [2] https://radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid=BUF&product=N0R&overlay=11101111&loop=yes https://radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid=BUF&product=N0R&over... [3] https://radar.weather.gov/Conus/northeast_loop.php https://radar.weather.gov/Conus/northeast_loop.php
bpicolo 8y ago
I suspect a lot of early internet amateur animators got started on pirated/shared versions of Flash. Probably helped the proliferation of that scene a whole lot. Cloud based service models make that much harder.
- basch 8y ago
  $20.99 for all of creative suite is also a much lower entry point price.
  - bpicolo 8y ago
    12-14 year olds aren't going to be dropping 250 bucks a year. If you look at something like newgrounds, a lot of that was bored teenagers.
  - kitsunesoba 8y ago
    Things may have changed for today’s teens, but having been a teen through the 00’s that would’ve been too expensive for me. It was hard to even justify a WoW subscription at $15/month even with the near endless entertainment value that provided. Also, with the CC subscription setup, if you stop paying you lose access to your creations. That’s not too big of a deal for working adults, but for a teen with tumultuous cash flow, it’s a huge dealbreaker. I spent hundreds of hours in Photoshop as a teen, but I likely would’ve have bothered with it at all if it weren’t easily piratable.
  - molmalo 8y ago
    Depends on where you live in this World. For young people here (south america) that could be a lot. That's a problem generally with cloud services. Pricing is mostly done considering some countries and contexts, but totally ignoring other. With physical equivalents some years ago, local distributors made deals with their home offices to adjust for this, but that's not something usually done anymore.

jonplackett 8y ago

Totally agree with this! I miss the simple days of build once run anywhere and just being able to bash out a fun idea in an afternoon and release it and know everyone would have the same experience. Yeah security was crap with flash but surely that could have been solved. I think the battery use and apple’s desire to make sure everything had to go through their paid AppStore was what killed it really though.

jonplackett 8y ago
I wish adobe would make a flash-like interface that output html5 / JavaScript / css
- mhenr18 8y ago
  Their current Animate product (they renamed Flash Pro) is pretty much what you're looking for, if I'm not mistaken.
- vturner 8y ago
  When Steve Jobs and company effectively killed "RIAs" I remember Adobe pivoting and promising a software to do what they previously had but output HTML5/CSS/JSS instead of Flash. It looks like it is still alive in the form of Adobe Animate?
  - bdcravens 8y ago
    The product was originally called Adobe Edge, and it was rolled into Adobe Animate.
    - nostalgeek 8y ago
      > The product was originally called Adobe Edge, and it was rolled into Adobe Animate. Not Adobe Edge was killed dead, it was not rolled into Adobe Animate. Edge did export animation with jQuery and DOM element, while Adobe Animate exports animations in pure canvas.
- 8y ago

steveklabnik 8y ago

Yes; as I said in the post, I focused mostly on implementor's needs here. When I eventually do a user comparison, this is a huge pro for Flash.

code_duck 8y ago

To me, flash was like the past, or a warped vision of the distant future. The interfaces people created had visual appeal, but that’s all they had. It lacked all of the usability that I was used to finding on webpages, and therefore made for a very frustrating experience. No bookmarking, no back and forward, no right clicking to open a new tab, frequent superfluous sound, major security holes, long loading times. I would hardly call any of this elegant. As a user, I was thrilled when people stopped using flash. Flash was like using poor quality native apps, which was a step backwards from a browser.

gameswithgo 8y ago
flash used to make websites was garbage, but used to make games that run in the browser it was very nice.
- neospice 8y ago
  It seems the trend was that it was nice for makers, not so much for users.
  - izacus 8y ago
    Which, ironically, is the case with modern Electron apps and bloated JavaScript UI frameworks as well.
    - balfirevic 8y ago
      I'm a user of several Electron apps and they are very nice for me too.
      - weiming 8y ago
        Electron (or embedded Chromium, etc.) is lazy development: save time on cross-platform work at the expense of your users' CPU overhead/battery time/SSD life. Spend time watching some of each year's WWDC talks and noting how much effort Apple engineers give to fine-tune certain APIs to enable app developers to optimize battery use, disk access, or graphics rendering. State-of the art stuff. And then your Electron app just ignores all of that.

gameswithgo 8y ago

The time is ripe for someone to recreate something like Flash the builds to WASM

pier25 8y ago
Adobe has Animate CC, which is basically Flash Pro with a new name that also outputs to JS, canvas, and webgl. I think it's very probable it will implement WASM in the future.

tjoff 8y ago

Well, you could run flash in webassembly and get all that back. But it would still come with many of the drawbacks.

nostalgeek 8y ago
https://github.com/mozilla/shumway https://github.com/mozilla/shumway is supposed to be an implementation of the Flash VM in typescript, But it can't even run in latest Firefox browser anymore apparently and no commits from 2 years.

jhabdas 8y ago

Macromedia Flash keyframe animation was great even for technical users who didn't know animation. However, as soon as you wanted any kind of interactivity you had to start learning a new scripting language and that was painful for everyone.

nostalgeek 8y ago
> Macromedia Flash keyframe animation was great even for technical users who didn't know animation. However, as soon as you wanted any kind of interactivity you had to start learning a new scripting language and that was painful for everyone. Not really. Action Script has always been close to Javascript/JScript.Net and now Typescript, it is the same syntax. In fact ActionScript 3 was supposed to be the template for ECMASCRIPT 4, before it was abandoned.

sureaboutthis 8y ago

Flash is an application. WebAssembly is a compiler. Not the same thing.

reaperducer 8y ago

I had a lot of "oh wow" moments at the end of the 90's and beginning of the 00's with Flash. A lot of users did, too. But it was usually along the lines of "Oh, wow. This page has flash. Well, I guess I'll go get a Coke while the Flash plugin loads into the browser and my computer can't go anything else. If I'm lucky, the whole thing won't crash and take all my work with it by the time I get back." We romanticize the past.

Angostura 8y ago
Maybe they just wanted to play with splendid stuff like http://wordperhect.e-2.org http://wordperhect.e-2.org
larntz 8y ago
You know what was worse than that? Embedded RealPlayer.
- rhizome 8y ago
  I get enough "buffering..." spinners these days that RealPlayer jokes are in danger of being re-evaluated.
kalleboo 8y ago
I never had those issues with Flash. Just low framerates and long loading spinners for the bigger animations. Java applets OTOH had the exact experience you describe. Those were absolutely terrible.

dopeboy 8y ago

I agree. In the early 2000s, I learned about animation through Flash. I remember working on a 9th grade project that I illustrated through Flash. I remember learning what frames were, what keyframes were, what vectors were, etc. It was just the right amount of non-technical for me to make sense of it. Taking a step back, man what a different world it was back then. I'd fire up MS Frontpage or Macromedia Dreamweaver and go to town. The expectations have changed on the maintainability, usability, and functionality parts so I understand why we are where we are today. Both I do miss those simple days.

jackcviers3 8y ago
Flash was much more than animation. ActionScript was a fantastic language for developing dynamic client guis in. Flex's component based model was way better than what we have now -- basically typed webcomponents with a consistent runtime, and mxmlc and mxml was open source. Actionscript 3 was a fine language, with types and a nice compiler to work with. Steve Jobs and browser security holes killed Flash, and no current open web platform covers all the use cases mxml and AS3 covered for cross-browser development. I could analyze audio channels, run lightweight process concurrency via green-threading, store user files, do i81n translation, streaming websockets and work with actual binary data types in the browser in 2006. I could trigger actions based on events in video and audio streams. I had consistently applied css with animations across components in 2006. I had reusable web components in 206. It's now 2018 and we still don't have cross-browser support for all of that. Oh, and I could run my app on the desktop in offline mode and in the browser. Security was an issue. Looking back now, I think an Android-like permissions scheme is what it, and the browser, needs to fulfill the promise of write once run anywhere that the browser and the web tends to make.
- pixelbath 8y ago
  >Actionscript 3 was a fine language It was heavily based off ES5, which really helped launch my Javascript abilities forward at the time. I was sad to see it go and ended up working with other technology that never felt as fun. I remembered recently that Haxe was initially based off of MTASC (something I used in the later AS3 days), and checked it out. It's quite a stable ecosystem that feels very familiar in syntax. Add in HaxeFlixel, and it's almost like Flash never left.

lev99 8y ago

Any reason why we cannot build a WYSIWYG editor as a high level WebAssembly language?

sbjs 8y ago

Kind of makes me wonder if there's a market for a React.js editor that works a lot like the Web Inspector does right now, where you can build your hierarchy as a nested list, set properties of each layer through a table, "wire" properties through several layers of hierarchy to reach further down components, and reference functions easily in the table. As long as it has support for lifecycle methods, it feels like it could become a natural UI for writing React apps!

bitwize 8y ago

Flash was indeed a tool for cultural creatives. You can tell because it only ever worked properly under Internet Explorer for Mac OS Classic. On every other browser/platform combo, there were framerate issues and the audio would gradually desync from the video. Forget about seeing these issues resolved in the afterthought of a Linux port.

dep_b 8y ago
Hehe yes I remember putting silent audio loops in Flash animations so the FPS wouldn't drift too much.

stefs 8y ago

i once (~15 years ago) worked at a web design shop where the founders were both architects. they did everything in flash as it somewhat resembled the tools they knew - cad software. one of them was the designer and he was really good and they made amazing websites without even knowing a shred of html or even programming languages (they didn't even use actionscript). in case the customer wanted a guestbook they used a free ad-supported one (until i joined as a programmer). flash was a good tool for the websites they used to create, usually graphics and animation heavy websites low on interactivity. they used the export function to generate the swf including the html index page to embed it. over the years focus shifted more and more to dynamic websites with content generated from databases and they were mostly lost there. dynamic content (loaded by http requests from databases) in flash usually turned into a huge pain in the ass after a while. for those projects we switched to a traditional website model where dynamic content mostly wasn't loaded into flash, instead it was a html-by-php website where flash animations replaced header jpegs (i.e. animated passive content). so, in our case, flash was a good replacement for animated and slightly interactive but not dynamically generated content.

techsin101 8y ago

In 2007 flash could run 3d games, do shaders, have multiplayer, run physics manipulation, have 3d sound, do bitmap manipulation, socket programming, and had documentation built into the editor. Even now html/J's can't do all of the things and most of the things that you can do, are not as fast. While browsers are stuck with legacies to uphold. Flash had no dom to worry about, untyped language (as3) or had css holding it back. General argument was flash sucks because people make terrible content with it. Which is like saying I hate having hands because I trip things over.. so no limbs = no mess PERFECT. In turn I think it helped push native apps. Since plain Js/html app just sucked in comparison when it comes to experience and capabilities. Flash should have been open sourced. Hopefully with webgl and web assembly someone can step in and create something similar

blitmap 8y ago
I think the key thing to keep in mind is that Flash gave you all of that from one vendor in a coherent, easy to make use of experience. We can certainly do the same things with JS and the technologies we have outside Flash, but it takes a lot of mental work to stitch it all together. You have to know so many frameworks. You have to know the type of frameworks you're looking for to do `x`. And then there's a lot of performance tuning because something done through canvas isn't as fast as something done with the DOM, etc. Flash was gross but useful.