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I had a formative experience with Flash as a middle schooler. I loved Albino Blacksheep, Newgrounds, etc. I thought the videos were hilarious and the stick-figu

by l_t 7y ago

I had a formative experience with Flash as a middle schooler. I loved Albino Blacksheep, Newgrounds, etc. I thought the videos were hilarious and the stick-figure-style animation was approachable. So I acquired Flash, and I was blown away by how easy it was to create these silly animations. Automatic tweening was a miracle to me. Since then I've done a lot of video editing with different tools, but I still think back to Macromedia Flash and how I, a child with no ability to code and no knowledge of HTML or Web tech, was able to make my imagination come to life on the screen. I believe it's that powerful experience for novices that we're missing. I'm not sure how we should get it back. (edit: phrasing)

djsumdog 7y ago
I know a lot of early Adult Swing shows were made with Flash (I think Aqua Teen?). What are studios using today? Is there anything equivalent today that matches the power of Flash for young animators?
- pengstrom 7y ago
  ToonBoom is very popular.
  - PBnFlash 7y ago
    Flash MX was super easy to pirate, Toonboom is like 2000$ software with a much harder learning curve.
- FooHentai 7y ago
  Isn't Flash still viable for animation studios? I thought Flash Player is what's going away, effectively killing Flash playback on the Web, but Flash itself as an animation platform continues to be a supported, actively-developed and commercially available tool.
  - j2bax 7y ago
    Yes it’s still very commonly used by animators. They actually changed the name of the application to Animate but not too much has changed over the last 10 years. We still use it heavily at our studio for 2D game animation and short form animation for TV/web.
  - bsanr2 7y ago
    Adobe Animate is the successor to Flash's animation toolset. Animators use a number of different tools today, many that implement tweening, depending on studio needs. Also, low or no-cost applications that are accessible to newcomers include Blender and the upcoming Procreate 5.
    - zanny 7y ago
      Theres also OpenToonz and Synfig as other open source options
- zanny 7y ago
  The My Little Pony show just ended and it used Flash for 9 seasons. Most modern cartoons use ToonBoom though.
CryoLogic 7y ago
https://www.anim8.io https://www.anim8.io might spark your imagination again. Lots of animators are still making indy animation, it's just been drowned out on the major platforms due to how time consuming it is to create and it's basically not possible to monetize well outside of Anim8 now (YouTube algorithm favors frequent uploads and high video duration - not compatible with animation).
- zyx321 7y ago
  Anim8 seems to be the closest thing to classic Flash animation, albeit without the interactive component. However, I'm a little disappointed that it seems to output in MP4. Is there really no modern format for vector video?
hunta2097 7y ago
Disclaimer: I'm an old git. I think you have deftly described a bigger problem, as the whole industry gets more and more sophisticated and complex. The barrier for entry is so high now that I think it stifles young people's interest too quickly. The great thing about Flash was the developer tool. Part animation studio, part simple programming IDE. It was a great balance. Maybe there is a place in the market for framework to implement a flash-a-like in a HTML5 Canvas?
- dillonmckay 7y ago
  I was amazed when I discovered ‘tweening’ in the IDE.
- larsiusprime 7y ago
  It's called OpenFL[1] and it is exactly that! Supports canvas and WebGL, as well as a whole bunch of native targets too. This is a reimplementation of the Flash API in the Haxe programming language. And ruffle-rs[2] is a reimplemenation of the flash player itself in Rust. (So you'd still be using ActionScript for authoring) [1]https://www.openfl.org/ https://www.openfl.org/ [2]https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > It's called OpenFL and it is exactly that The first beginner tutorial is about displaying a bitmap and starts with a terminal [1]. This is not as discoverable as Flash’s tools, which felt more like MS Paint when first opened. [1] https://www.openfl.org/learn/haxelib/tutorials/displaying-a-bitmap/ https://www.openfl.org/learn/haxelib/tutorials/displaying-a-...
    - Paperweight 7y ago
      ...yeah there's no way the creatives we're talking about are gonna use that. There must _not_ be any command line or scripting involved for most of the population to be able to use it. But why reinvent the wheel? I think that the key to Flash's success is in its roots as an excellent, intuitive vector graphics editor called SmartSketch. (Way easier to use than Inkscape, IMO) They added animation to compete with Macromedia Shockwave in 1995, and the rest is the well known history of corporate greed and a victim of its own success. The Flash IDE is still around, however (https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html), but Adobe's giving it up at the end of 2020 :( I can only hope that they open source it. A light, friendly version is Flash 5. It's available online (http://www.oldversion.com/windows/macromedia-flash-5-0 http://www.oldversion.com/windows/macromedia-flash-5-0), weighs in at a whopping 18 MB, and still works on Windows 10! Anyway, Flash 5 Player .swf files can be exported as standalone .exe "Projectors". For example, the IDE tutorial one (https://www.sharhon.com/files/flash5test.exe https://www.sharhon.com/files/flash5test.exe) stands at 405 KB and still runs on Windows 10 as well. Surely it would be possible to wrap _real_ Flash projectors in a WebAssembly Windows NT emulator using a drag-and-drop webpage...and let the games begin.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Mathnerd314 7y ago
Everything young people do now outside of schooling and dedicated hobbies seems to be mobile-based, so Tiktok is probably the equivalent to Newgrounds these days. This "novices" thing seems to me to be overblown though; Alan Kay has been beating the "programming for novices" drum for decades with Smalltalk and basically nothing happened. I would rather have professional-quality tools with decent Youtube tutorials, like Blender, Unity, Python, etc. have been developing.
- chii 7y ago
  > Tiktok is probably the equivalent to Newgrounds these days. that's like comparing crack-cocaine den to LARP'ing groups. No way newgrounds is anything comparable to the lows that is tiktok (or vine).
  - eXpl0it3r 7y ago
    The comparison isn't about the quality, creativeness or usefulness, but about on what kids spend their free time and attention.
sircastor 7y ago
This reminds me of my discovery and learning Hypercard probably 15 years before you learned Flash. To me it was the same kind of creative spark. I was encouraged by Cosmic Osmo, and later Myst and the like. I never did learn to program with it. I don't know where the modern equivalent is. Maybe they only pop up every couple of decades...
legym 7y ago
I didn't know anyone else knew albino black sheep. Browing miniclip and playing flash games was the peak of middle school for me
- dlgeek 7y ago
  ...I can't tell if you're being hyperbolic or what. It was incredibly popular, and I'd suspect most US-based HN users are familiar with it.
mntmoss 7y ago
I think the essential thing about this era is a gradual cultural rediscovery of ownership. We've just been through a very lengthy race to the bottom for all sorts of information - pretty much anything ephemeral and disposable is free or extremely cheap, and then heavily locked down to protect property rights. And it's built a kind of event horizon to culture where all the things pressed up closest to the digital universe just disappear into a little footnote on a wiki page saying "yes, this happened". Memes, blog posts, videos, games, etc. There is a game product called "Fortnite", and it's just had a huge in-game event, so it's clearly here, alive and well, but you'll never again be able to experience Fortnite as it was 24 hours ago - ever. And yet future culture is, as Alan Kay puts it, "the past and the present". It's our reaction to that hole, where nothing really builds on anything else, that, in turn, is motivating interest in products with longer time horizons, longer stories and histories to them. An obvious metaphor for this is video games vs pinball: * Fundamentally digital vs fundamentally analog * Mostly design & marketing vs mostly manufacturing * Trivially cloned vs scarce, unique * Black-box artifact vs maintainable assembly * Perpetually caught in the breathless hype cycle of tech, vs increasingly existing outside of that cycle Pinball's days as part of the traditional amusement business ended with the 1990's, but it's found a resurgence of interest in the home market as a kind of collectable furniture - something to put in a rec room or a basement arcade, that retains decent trade value if maintained. A whole array of small manufacturers have appeared this decade to serve that market. It's much easier to understand a collector's market for it being sustained 30 years out, versus video game collecting, in which any product with a modicum of popularity will have had its primary content either already preserved through piracy(if emulated), or else impossible to reproduce(if a service). It's a much stronger version of interest in vinyl records or dead-tree books taking precedent over streaming music and e-books. Because digital media has so little physical value, it is beholden to be entirely marketing driven, front-to-back, and to treat you as either a product marketer or as the product, and sometimes both. The true form of the medium remains always hidden behind the UI. Even your personal work, done on systems you wholly control, just disappears into a collection of files, where it is easily forgotten. And in that sense I think we are not really asking, "Where is Flash? Where is Hypercard? Where is BASIC?" - because in different eras each of those tools did the kinds of things we wanted and expected from a beginner's tool - so much as we are asking, "Where is the actual medium? Where can I do work and preserve the original source material? Where can I send a kid to learn to play with software and not have it all break six months later, rendering the learning useless? How can I curate software when nobody can make any promises?" Tech continues its warfare for a platform monopoly, and so on this front we keep starting from zero, over and over. It's not hugely different from the space we've arrived at in professional software development, where dependency hell and code rot is an ever-increasing concern for all codebases.
smcl 7y ago
Carefully worded, I suspect we both “acquired” it through similar means :-)
eXpl0it3r 7y ago
> I believe it's that powerful experience for novices that we're missing I think we have more "powerful experiences" for novices than ever before, which is part of the whole attention problem. In the early 2000, we didn't have YouTube, Netflix, WhatsApp, TikTok, etc. where tons of teens spend many, many, many hours in nowadays. Those who got access to Flash found a sink for their free time and after just a few hours will have figured out the basic elements. Try to get kids to focus for just these initial few hours on their own, without them getting distracted on some other platform or immediately trying to find a YouTube tutorial, instead of just trying things and actually learning the tool, rather than copying whatever someone else is doing in a video.

by l_t 7y ago

djsumdog 7y ago

I know a lot of early Adult Swing shows were made with Flash (I think Aqua Teen?). What are studios using today? Is there anything equivalent today that matches the power of Flash for young animators?

pengstrom 7y ago
ToonBoom is very popular.
- PBnFlash 7y ago
  Flash MX was super easy to pirate, Toonboom is like 2000$ software with a much harder learning curve.
FooHentai 7y ago
Isn't Flash still viable for animation studios? I thought Flash Player is what's going away, effectively killing Flash playback on the Web, but Flash itself as an animation platform continues to be a supported, actively-developed and commercially available tool.
- j2bax 7y ago
  Yes it’s still very commonly used by animators. They actually changed the name of the application to Animate but not too much has changed over the last 10 years. We still use it heavily at our studio for 2D game animation and short form animation for TV/web.
- bsanr2 7y ago
  Adobe Animate is the successor to Flash's animation toolset. Animators use a number of different tools today, many that implement tweening, depending on studio needs. Also, low or no-cost applications that are accessible to newcomers include Blender and the upcoming Procreate 5.
  - zanny 7y ago
    Theres also OpenToonz and Synfig as other open source options
zanny 7y ago
The My Little Pony show just ended and it used Flash for 9 seasons. Most modern cartoons use ToonBoom though.

CryoLogic 7y ago

https://www.anim8.io https://www.anim8.io might spark your imagination again. Lots of animators are still making indy animation, it's just been drowned out on the major platforms due to how time consuming it is to create and it's basically not possible to monetize well outside of Anim8 now (YouTube algorithm favors frequent uploads and high video duration - not compatible with animation).

zyx321 7y ago
Anim8 seems to be the closest thing to classic Flash animation, albeit without the interactive component. However, I'm a little disappointed that it seems to output in MP4. Is there really no modern format for vector video?

hunta2097 7y ago

Disclaimer: I'm an old git. I think you have deftly described a bigger problem, as the whole industry gets more and more sophisticated and complex. The barrier for entry is so high now that I think it stifles young people's interest too quickly. The great thing about Flash was the developer tool. Part animation studio, part simple programming IDE. It was a great balance. Maybe there is a place in the market for framework to implement a flash-a-like in a HTML5 Canvas?

dillonmckay 7y ago
I was amazed when I discovered ‘tweening’ in the IDE.
larsiusprime 7y ago
It's called OpenFL[1] and it is exactly that! Supports canvas and WebGL, as well as a whole bunch of native targets too. This is a reimplementation of the Flash API in the Haxe programming language. And ruffle-rs[2] is a reimplemenation of the flash player itself in Rust. (So you'd still be using ActionScript for authoring) [1]https://www.openfl.org/ https://www.openfl.org/ [2]https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > It's called OpenFL and it is exactly that The first beginner tutorial is about displaying a bitmap and starts with a terminal [1]. This is not as discoverable as Flash’s tools, which felt more like MS Paint when first opened. [1] https://www.openfl.org/learn/haxelib/tutorials/displaying-a-bitmap/ https://www.openfl.org/learn/haxelib/tutorials/displaying-a-...
  - Paperweight 7y ago
    ...yeah there's no way the creatives we're talking about are gonna use that. There must _not_ be any command line or scripting involved for most of the population to be able to use it. But why reinvent the wheel? I think that the key to Flash's success is in its roots as an excellent, intuitive vector graphics editor called SmartSketch. (Way easier to use than Inkscape, IMO) They added animation to compete with Macromedia Shockwave in 1995, and the rest is the well known history of corporate greed and a victim of its own success. The Flash IDE is still around, however (https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html), but Adobe's giving it up at the end of 2020 :( I can only hope that they open source it. A light, friendly version is Flash 5. It's available online (http://www.oldversion.com/windows/macromedia-flash-5-0 http://www.oldversion.com/windows/macromedia-flash-5-0), weighs in at a whopping 18 MB, and still works on Windows 10! Anyway, Flash 5 Player .swf files can be exported as standalone .exe "Projectors". For example, the IDE tutorial one (https://www.sharhon.com/files/flash5test.exe https://www.sharhon.com/files/flash5test.exe) stands at 405 KB and still runs on Windows 10 as well. Surely it would be possible to wrap _real_ Flash projectors in a WebAssembly Windows NT emulator using a drag-and-drop webpage...and let the games begin.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Mathnerd314 7y ago

Everything young people do now outside of schooling and dedicated hobbies seems to be mobile-based, so Tiktok is probably the equivalent to Newgrounds these days. This "novices" thing seems to me to be overblown though; Alan Kay has been beating the "programming for novices" drum for decades with Smalltalk and basically nothing happened. I would rather have professional-quality tools with decent Youtube tutorials, like Blender, Unity, Python, etc. have been developing.

chii 7y ago
> Tiktok is probably the equivalent to Newgrounds these days. that's like comparing crack-cocaine den to LARP'ing groups. No way newgrounds is anything comparable to the lows that is tiktok (or vine).
- eXpl0it3r 7y ago
  The comparison isn't about the quality, creativeness or usefulness, but about on what kids spend their free time and attention.

sircastor 7y ago

This reminds me of my discovery and learning Hypercard probably 15 years before you learned Flash. To me it was the same kind of creative spark. I was encouraged by Cosmic Osmo, and later Myst and the like. I never did learn to program with it. I don't know where the modern equivalent is. Maybe they only pop up every couple of decades...

legym 7y ago

I didn't know anyone else knew albino black sheep. Browing miniclip and playing flash games was the peak of middle school for me

dlgeek 7y ago
...I can't tell if you're being hyperbolic or what. It was incredibly popular, and I'd suspect most US-based HN users are familiar with it.

mntmoss 7y ago

I think the essential thing about this era is a gradual cultural rediscovery of ownership. We've just been through a very lengthy race to the bottom for all sorts of information - pretty much anything ephemeral and disposable is free or extremely cheap, and then heavily locked down to protect property rights. And it's built a kind of event horizon to culture where all the things pressed up closest to the digital universe just disappear into a little footnote on a wiki page saying "yes, this happened". Memes, blog posts, videos, games, etc. There is a game product called "Fortnite", and it's just had a huge in-game event, so it's clearly here, alive and well, but you'll never again be able to experience Fortnite as it was 24 hours ago - ever. And yet future culture is, as Alan Kay puts it, "the past and the present". It's our reaction to that hole, where nothing really builds on anything else, that, in turn, is motivating interest in products with longer time horizons, longer stories and histories to them. An obvious metaphor for this is video games vs pinball: * Fundamentally digital vs fundamentally analog * Mostly design & marketing vs mostly manufacturing * Trivially cloned vs scarce, unique * Black-box artifact vs maintainable assembly * Perpetually caught in the breathless hype cycle of tech, vs increasingly existing outside of that cycle Pinball's days as part of the traditional amusement business ended with the 1990's, but it's found a resurgence of interest in the home market as a kind of collectable furniture - something to put in a rec room or a basement arcade, that retains decent trade value if maintained. A whole array of small manufacturers have appeared this decade to serve that market. It's much easier to understand a collector's market for it being sustained 30 years out, versus video game collecting, in which any product with a modicum of popularity will have had its primary content either already preserved through piracy(if emulated), or else impossible to reproduce(if a service). It's a much stronger version of interest in vinyl records or dead-tree books taking precedent over streaming music and e-books. Because digital media has so little physical value, it is beholden to be entirely marketing driven, front-to-back, and to treat you as either a product marketer or as the product, and sometimes both. The true form of the medium remains always hidden behind the UI. Even your personal work, done on systems you wholly control, just disappears into a collection of files, where it is easily forgotten. And in that sense I think we are not really asking, "Where is Flash? Where is Hypercard? Where is BASIC?" - because in different eras each of those tools did the kinds of things we wanted and expected from a beginner's tool - so much as we are asking, "Where is the actual medium? Where can I do work and preserve the original source material? Where can I send a kid to learn to play with software and not have it all break six months later, rendering the learning useless? How can I curate software when nobody can make any promises?" Tech continues its warfare for a platform monopoly, and so on this front we keep starting from zero, over and over. It's not hugely different from the space we've arrived at in professional software development, where dependency hell and code rot is an ever-increasing concern for all codebases.

smcl 7y ago

Carefully worded, I suspect we both “acquired” it through similar means :-)

eXpl0it3r 7y ago

> I believe it's that powerful experience for novices that we're missing I think we have more "powerful experiences" for novices than ever before, which is part of the whole attention problem. In the early 2000, we didn't have YouTube, Netflix, WhatsApp, TikTok, etc. where tons of teens spend many, many, many hours in nowadays. Those who got access to Flash found a sink for their free time and after just a few hours will have figured out the basic elements. Try to get kids to focus for just these initial few hours on their own, without them getting distracted on some other platform or immediately trying to find a YouTube tutorial, instead of just trying things and actually learning the tool, rather than copying whatever someone else is doing in a video.