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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

by 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.
    - joshtynjala 7y ago
      Adobe Flash Player, the web browser plugin, will no longer be updated in 2020. The Flash IDE, now called Animate, continues to be developed by Adobe. They have not announced an end of life for this tool. It will still be updated after 2020. In fact, it can now export a variety of new formats other than SWF files for Flash Player, and they've been expanding the animation features quite a bit in recent years. It's unfortunate that many people are confused about what exactly Adobe has discontinued. So many people in this thread are lamenting that this user friendly animation tool no longer exists as a starting point for new users, when in fact, it does and will still be in active development beyond 2020.
      - egypturnash 7y ago
        It’s worth noting that it’s no longer a user-friendly tool for making interactive experiences, though. The current version of Actionscript is working hard to be a Real Programming Language, with a lot more code to write to make anything happen. It feels like Java to AS2’s Basic, and you just can’t write stuff in AS2 any more. (AS1 is gone too, it was something you had to write by selecting verbs in a massive dropdown, and good riddance to that.)
      - Mindwipe 7y ago
        > So many people in this thread are lamenting that this user friendly animation tool no longer exists as a starting point for new users, when in fact, it does and will still be in active development beyond 2020. Animate really isn't as simple to use as Flash is, and bluntly in the modern Era the CC suite is too expensive to get those young users. I wonder if Affinity will have a go at this in the long run.
  - larsiusprime 7y ago
    It's a fair criticism. There is a workflow you can use with a custom Adobe Animate plugin that lets you use Adobe Animate as your authoring tool.
pgcj_poster 7y ago
Wickeditor is meant to be something like that: https://www.wickeditor.com/#/ https://www.wickeditor.com/#/
- Crinus 7y ago
  It looks kinda interesting but the apparent mobile-oriented interface makes it highly unusable (and wastes a ton of screen space). The "legacy" version that used a more compact UI, menu bar and right click menus is much easier and faster to use (it took me a lot of time to figure out how to add a keyframe with the mobile-oriented interface which basically was moving my mouse over everything i thought was an interactive element to see a tooltip about what it does -- ironically this most likely wont be possible on a mobile device).
dTal 7y ago
Not just young people. As in other creative arts, if the tooling is over-complex or high-friction it can simply kill the creative flow. We should aim to make things pleasant to use for experts as well as beginners. There is a great deal of philosophical resistance to this idea hiding just under the surface, driven perhaps by a sense that difficult interfaces are a test of worthiness. Consider the barrier to entry to create a 'hello world' mobile app - it seems awesomely, perversely difficult compared to the intrinsic simplicity of the task. I would argue that this is deliberate gatekeeping - if ordinary people could create content, this would threaten an awful lot of business models, including and especially the business models of people who run app stores and take a cut of the profits. Can't have the techno-serfs programming, can we?
- blueboo 7y ago
  ah yes, the famous "intrinsic simplicity" of writing, compiling, and deploying an app to an embedded device... ...perhaps you mean the countless drag-and-drop code-free frameworks that enable people to create apps without writing code? Or that a basic Swift tutorial to do just that takes about 15 minutes, including downloading Xcode? I just can't understand this confused nostalgia.
  - buboard 7y ago
    > the famous "intrinsic simplicity" of writing, compiling, and deploying an app to an embedded device. 90% of apps can be replicated as web pages, which are far, far easier to program and deploy. Frameworks do add a lot needless of complexity for little benefit. The reason is not a "test of worthiness" though - the purpose is developer lock-in and make it as much difficult as possible to switch to the competing platform. The only way to win this game is not to play
    - Osiris 7y ago
      My company has been using expo for mobile development because you can build a React app and expo does all the work to make it work on Android and iOS. It's not perfect but since we're doing React for the web app, it's allowed web devs to become mobile devs with almost no additional training.
l_t 7y ago
I would love to see something with a Flash-like UI. I'm not sure if there is a place for it in the middle-school market anymore, though. I'll explain why: I think an interesting part of my experience was that it started with watching. I just loved the videos and thought they were hilarious. I admired the people who made those videos and I wanted to join that circle of creators. And Flash didn't prevent me from doing that. Not only that, but it was a specific low-effort style of animation. The path from consumer -> producer was short. So really, I think you have to look at what people are consuming, and then try and make it easy for them to "participate." I'm not sure if people are consuming Flash-style animations anymore. (Maybe they are, and I just aged out of the demographic.) It seems like a lot of that creative energy has moved to sandbox games like Minecraft for now, where that community of creators and would-be creators still exists, and away from animation and Web design.
- KhoomeiK 7y ago
  That's an interesting way to look at it. I know the Minecraft era definitely had its equivalent code-related fanbase who'd make plugins and mods in Java. The age of Minecraft has also faded away though (besides the most recent Pewdiepie revival) and I'm not sure Fortnite or the other shooter games of today have a programmatic side.
  - erklik 7y ago
    Fortnite defintely doesn't AFAIK, and their nature as a multiplayer game invites competition, and therefore, cheating making it important for the developer to actually de incentivize modding. I am very disappointed that modding of famous games is going down honestly.
  - l_t 7y ago
    With Minecraft, even just watching a Youtube video and copying their build-style to make something cool is enough for a kid to learn that they can be a creator. They realize that there's no magic; all it takes to make something nice is a little knowledge, and a lot of work. From what I've seen of Fortnite, it promotes a different kind of creativity, which is more like creative problem solving (boxing people in, riding rockets, etc.) But it does have a sandbox mode that I've seen some interesting creations from.
blueboo 7y ago
The opposite is the case, actually. It's far easier than ever to make animations and write software. I would contend Flash was a miserable developer tool, a near feature-free IDE, and rather than "balance", it took a kitchen sink approach to letting you put any kind of code anywhere...in an object, on the document, in a UI event of a button, on a frame. Meanwhile, there are quite a few flash-likes for HTML5, and many of them are smart enough not to use Canvas (much)!
- aidenn0 7y ago
  MS Excel also lets you put any kind of code anywhere. IMO, nNot forcing any organization lowers the barrier to entry.
  - mr_toad 7y ago
    > Not forcing any organization lowers the barrier to entry. And raises the barrier to maintenance.
    - aidenn0 7y ago
      That part is (hopefully) obvious to the typical HN reader, but the fact that some things that make maintenance harder also make it easier for non-developers is sometimes missed.
    - albertsondev 7y ago
      Maintenance doesn't really matter when you're trying to just get into something as a novice and voraciously create. A larval developer's gateway project is all but guaranteed to end up as an incomprehensible mess of spaghetti that'll fall to pieces at the lightest touch after a summer of plugging away at it, but that's not what's important. What's important is that they could make something -- something real. By the time it's left as a shambling pile of kluges and bad practices that'll never see the light of day again, it's still gotten far enough to inspire something, and serves as a great point to move on to greater ambitions -- or even start from scratch with one's lessons learned and make it better, perhaps with a more advanced toolset that now seems infinitely more approachable than it did at the beginning. This isn't a discussion about tools to create software that'll be refined, depended on, and passed on to new developers over the span of years. It's about bridging the gap between restrictive toys and actual non-trivial projects for novices to tinker with.
sophiebits 7y ago
Adobe Animate is a successor to Flash and is exactly this.
Angostura 7y ago
Except, except ... having watched my teenage daughter play some games recently, there seems to be a trend for pixel art going on, half the things she is playing have the graphical sophistication of the stuff I was playing on my ZX Spectrum (only a modicum of exaggeration).
phkahler 7y ago
>> Maybe there is a place in the market for framework to implement a flash-a-like in a HTML5 Canvas? If by "framework" you mean "easy to use tool" then I agree. Programmers are often the last people who should design tools - they dont bat an eye at having to edit a config file, tweak settings, install plugins, manage dependencies, run a compiler or other batch processing tool.
sitkack 7y ago
Programmers have a huge disdain for end user programming. Visual Basic, spreadsheets, even HyperCard. The vast majority of coding should be end user programming. The collective we just wants to own the tools and the jobs.
- ojbyrne 7y ago
  I am sympathetic to your sentiment, but the reason for the disdain is Professionalization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professionalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professionalization It's natural to want your job not to be turned over to the CEO's 14 year old son.
  - sitkack 7y ago
    This has not occurred and is not occurring in programming. The CEOs 14 year old son is a straw boy.
    - jeegsy 7y ago
      > The CEOs 14 year old son is a straw boy. Tee Hee
- pjmlp 7y ago
  On the contrary, I loved VB and Delphi, and it is the reason why I mostly focused on Java and .NET as my daily tools. Developers are users as well, and I think too many fail to understand this. Whatever tooling makes it easier to develop for, means that I can focus on other parts of the problem. I don't miss working like I did during the late 80, early 90s. Our computers are so much better for them to be reduced to a green phosphor VT-100 terminal.
  - Crinus 7y ago
    > Our computers are so much better for them to be reduced to a green phosphor VT-100 terminal. So much this. Every time someone harps about this or that great terminal application that looks worse than even MS-DOS applications from the late-80s (when most users had moved on from MDA cards) i die a little inside.
ericmcer 7y ago
The barrier to entry kinda needs to be high. The attention economy combined hordes of capable creative content producers means there is just not room for people who are not willing to work really hard at something. If you go back and watch some of the old flash stuff or play old flash games they are not good, they would be completely unnoticed today.
Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
There are options, at least if you want something to begin coding with; they're just a bit hard to find for the layperson that isn't following developer news. For example, apps that run directly on mobile platforms (specifically, ones that don't need to connect to the 'cloud' to do their compiling): - For iOS: Codea [1] (Lua), Continuous [2] (.NET), Swift Playgrounds [3] (Swift), Play.js [4] (Node.js + React Native) plus probably more (on that note, I really hope Continuous isn't abandoned, but it doesn't seem to have been updated in awhile). - For Android: AIDE [5], TIC-80 [6], probably others (I'm not as familiar) Moving up from mobile, you have FUZE4 Nintendo Switch [7] for the Nintendo Switch (excellent, but needs a bugfix update as there's lots of little annoyances). Probably the most kid-friendly thing there is right now IMHO, if you take into account the platform. On the PC, there's just a huge amount of stuff. Minecraft [8], GameMaker [9], GDevelop [10], Godot Engine [11]. These are at least suitable for early teens. [1] https://codea.io/ https://codea.io/ [2] http://continuous.codes/ http://continuous.codes/ [3] https://www.apple.com/au/swift/playgrounds/ https://www.apple.com/au/swift/playgrounds/ [4] https://playdotjs.com/ https://playdotjs.com/ [5] https://www.android-ide.com/ https://www.android-ide.com/ [6] https://tic.computer/ https://tic.computer/ [7] https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/fuze4-nintendo-switch/ https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/fuze4-nintendo-switch/ [8] https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/ https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/ [9] https://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker https://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker [10] https://gdevelop-app.com/ https://gdevelop-app.com/ [11] https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/ Note: Yes, obvious game-making bias here :)
- wongarsu 7y ago
  Also Unity's HTML export, and most notably Adobe Flash (which is "Flash but on a canvas" in the most literal way, even though the main demographic are now animators)
- Sendotsh 7y ago
  Game Maker is hugely underrated and often dismissed because of its name. It’s an incredibly powerful and easy to use game/interactive-app maker that can export packaged programs to Windows, OSX, Linux, and HTML5, then with additional licensing/fees to game consoles. It has a drag-and-drop mode for absolute beginners that can let someone with zero experience be creating simple games in their first weekend playing with it. Then it has GML mode which is their programming language with excellent documentation and a decent community cranking out tutorials and guides, which has put out some seriously legit indie games such as Red Strings Club, Hyperlight Drifter, and Hotline Miami. It’s also not just for games. It’s great for making interactive stories (I’ve made interactive kids books with it), HTML5 demos and interfaces, 2D physics demos, and even does basic 3D stuff. (Not affiliated just a big fan and use it extensively).
nabakin 7y ago
I was introduced to programming in middle school with Batch. A friend of mine was making a script to chat between computers and being able to make something interactive on a computer was so cool to me that I had him explain it. I learned Batch, then I learned Lua, Python, Java, and kept going. Minecraft which was really big at the time, drew me into making servers for my friends, which introduced me to plugins and programming them. I think there will always be easy ways to break into tech, they just might change from year to year.
bigiain 7y ago
I feel this too. As a kid, I could kinda understand how to go from programming in Basic to Pong or Space Invaders. A kid these days has _so_ many more expectations if they're wondering how Fortnite works... I had enough hubris as a 12/13 year old to write Space Invaders in ascii in Basic on an Osbourne2, and later to get a quite creditable imitation using sprites on an AppleII. I wonder if kids these days look at computers and think "I could do that" about anything they care about?
- jonfw 7y ago
  These days though- kids have access to much higher level languages and libraries and frameworks that can make some of these processes much easier. While it is much harder to understand the tech stack from the ground up- you can do a whole lot with the high level tools closer to the surface. Kids may not no how to go from BASIC to a video-game- but they don't have to write their games in BASIC. There are point and click game studios, there are really great physics engines available, there are libraries that attempt to make it simple. I remember learning how to build mods in minecraft ~10 years ago- there were tools out there that allowed you to make creatures or blocks that inherited behaviors programmed in other parts of the game- and you could do a lot with that!
  - bigiain 7y ago
    Do you have any pointers to, or keywords I can google, for some of those point and click game studios? I've not tried to do anything like a game for decades, I'm kinda curious about that readily available tools kids could get their hands on these days... Closest I think I've come is launching Scratch from a RasPi's stock linux install...
    - mlyle 7y ago
      Scratch 3.0 (released Jan) is great, if you want the shallowest learning curve. I was astounded-- played with it for 2-3 hours to know what my kid was learning and in that time wrote three simple games. I've heard great things about 001 Game Creator (free for 7 days, then $60) for more substantial use.
asdfman123 7y ago
The barrier to entry is higher because people's expectations for what a website is is higher. You can still make crappy HTML pages with very basic inline JS, but if you're a kid starting out, that's not enough. You should probably learn a JS framework and some graphic design if you don't want it to be laughed at. Our field is just becoming more mature and advanced. Cars used to be easier to work on, too.

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.
  - joshtynjala 7y ago
    Adobe Flash Player, the web browser plugin, will no longer be updated in 2020. The Flash IDE, now called Animate, continues to be developed by Adobe. They have not announced an end of life for this tool. It will still be updated after 2020. In fact, it can now export a variety of new formats other than SWF files for Flash Player, and they've been expanding the animation features quite a bit in recent years. It's unfortunate that many people are confused about what exactly Adobe has discontinued. So many people in this thread are lamenting that this user friendly animation tool no longer exists as a starting point for new users, when in fact, it does and will still be in active development beyond 2020.
    - egypturnash 7y ago
      It’s worth noting that it’s no longer a user-friendly tool for making interactive experiences, though. The current version of Actionscript is working hard to be a Real Programming Language, with a lot more code to write to make anything happen. It feels like Java to AS2’s Basic, and you just can’t write stuff in AS2 any more. (AS1 is gone too, it was something you had to write by selecting verbs in a massive dropdown, and good riddance to that.)
    - Mindwipe 7y ago
      > So many people in this thread are lamenting that this user friendly animation tool no longer exists as a starting point for new users, when in fact, it does and will still be in active development beyond 2020. Animate really isn't as simple to use as Flash is, and bluntly in the modern Era the CC suite is too expensive to get those young users. I wonder if Affinity will have a go at this in the long run.
- larsiusprime 7y ago
  It's a fair criticism. There is a workflow you can use with a custom Adobe Animate plugin that lets you use Adobe Animate as your authoring tool.

pgcj_poster 7y ago

Wickeditor is meant to be something like that: https://www.wickeditor.com/#/ https://www.wickeditor.com/#/

Crinus 7y ago
It looks kinda interesting but the apparent mobile-oriented interface makes it highly unusable (and wastes a ton of screen space). The "legacy" version that used a more compact UI, menu bar and right click menus is much easier and faster to use (it took me a lot of time to figure out how to add a keyframe with the mobile-oriented interface which basically was moving my mouse over everything i thought was an interactive element to see a tooltip about what it does -- ironically this most likely wont be possible on a mobile device).

dTal 7y ago

Not just young people. As in other creative arts, if the tooling is over-complex or high-friction it can simply kill the creative flow. We should aim to make things pleasant to use for experts as well as beginners. There is a great deal of philosophical resistance to this idea hiding just under the surface, driven perhaps by a sense that difficult interfaces are a test of worthiness. Consider the barrier to entry to create a 'hello world' mobile app - it seems awesomely, perversely difficult compared to the intrinsic simplicity of the task. I would argue that this is deliberate gatekeeping - if ordinary people could create content, this would threaten an awful lot of business models, including and especially the business models of people who run app stores and take a cut of the profits. Can't have the techno-serfs programming, can we?

blueboo 7y ago
ah yes, the famous "intrinsic simplicity" of writing, compiling, and deploying an app to an embedded device... ...perhaps you mean the countless drag-and-drop code-free frameworks that enable people to create apps without writing code? Or that a basic Swift tutorial to do just that takes about 15 minutes, including downloading Xcode? I just can't understand this confused nostalgia.
- buboard 7y ago
  > the famous "intrinsic simplicity" of writing, compiling, and deploying an app to an embedded device. 90% of apps can be replicated as web pages, which are far, far easier to program and deploy. Frameworks do add a lot needless of complexity for little benefit. The reason is not a "test of worthiness" though - the purpose is developer lock-in and make it as much difficult as possible to switch to the competing platform. The only way to win this game is not to play
  - Osiris 7y ago
    My company has been using expo for mobile development because you can build a React app and expo does all the work to make it work on Android and iOS. It's not perfect but since we're doing React for the web app, it's allowed web devs to become mobile devs with almost no additional training.

l_t 7y ago

I would love to see something with a Flash-like UI. I'm not sure if there is a place for it in the middle-school market anymore, though. I'll explain why: I think an interesting part of my experience was that it started with watching. I just loved the videos and thought they were hilarious. I admired the people who made those videos and I wanted to join that circle of creators. And Flash didn't prevent me from doing that. Not only that, but it was a specific low-effort style of animation. The path from consumer -> producer was short. So really, I think you have to look at what people are consuming, and then try and make it easy for them to "participate." I'm not sure if people are consuming Flash-style animations anymore. (Maybe they are, and I just aged out of the demographic.) It seems like a lot of that creative energy has moved to sandbox games like Minecraft for now, where that community of creators and would-be creators still exists, and away from animation and Web design.

KhoomeiK 7y ago
That's an interesting way to look at it. I know the Minecraft era definitely had its equivalent code-related fanbase who'd make plugins and mods in Java. The age of Minecraft has also faded away though (besides the most recent Pewdiepie revival) and I'm not sure Fortnite or the other shooter games of today have a programmatic side.
- erklik 7y ago
  Fortnite defintely doesn't AFAIK, and their nature as a multiplayer game invites competition, and therefore, cheating making it important for the developer to actually de incentivize modding. I am very disappointed that modding of famous games is going down honestly.
- l_t 7y ago
  With Minecraft, even just watching a Youtube video and copying their build-style to make something cool is enough for a kid to learn that they can be a creator. They realize that there's no magic; all it takes to make something nice is a little knowledge, and a lot of work. From what I've seen of Fortnite, it promotes a different kind of creativity, which is more like creative problem solving (boxing people in, riding rockets, etc.) But it does have a sandbox mode that I've seen some interesting creations from.

blueboo 7y ago

The opposite is the case, actually. It's far easier than ever to make animations and write software. I would contend Flash was a miserable developer tool, a near feature-free IDE, and rather than "balance", it took a kitchen sink approach to letting you put any kind of code anywhere...in an object, on the document, in a UI event of a button, on a frame. Meanwhile, there are quite a few flash-likes for HTML5, and many of them are smart enough not to use Canvas (much)!

aidenn0 7y ago
MS Excel also lets you put any kind of code anywhere. IMO, nNot forcing any organization lowers the barrier to entry.
- mr_toad 7y ago
  > Not forcing any organization lowers the barrier to entry. And raises the barrier to maintenance.
  - aidenn0 7y ago
    That part is (hopefully) obvious to the typical HN reader, but the fact that some things that make maintenance harder also make it easier for non-developers is sometimes missed.
  - albertsondev 7y ago
    Maintenance doesn't really matter when you're trying to just get into something as a novice and voraciously create. A larval developer's gateway project is all but guaranteed to end up as an incomprehensible mess of spaghetti that'll fall to pieces at the lightest touch after a summer of plugging away at it, but that's not what's important. What's important is that they could make something -- something real. By the time it's left as a shambling pile of kluges and bad practices that'll never see the light of day again, it's still gotten far enough to inspire something, and serves as a great point to move on to greater ambitions -- or even start from scratch with one's lessons learned and make it better, perhaps with a more advanced toolset that now seems infinitely more approachable than it did at the beginning. This isn't a discussion about tools to create software that'll be refined, depended on, and passed on to new developers over the span of years. It's about bridging the gap between restrictive toys and actual non-trivial projects for novices to tinker with.

sophiebits 7y ago

Adobe Animate is a successor to Flash and is exactly this.

Angostura 7y ago

Except, except ... having watched my teenage daughter play some games recently, there seems to be a trend for pixel art going on, half the things she is playing have the graphical sophistication of the stuff I was playing on my ZX Spectrum (only a modicum of exaggeration).

phkahler 7y ago

>> Maybe there is a place in the market for framework to implement a flash-a-like in a HTML5 Canvas? If by "framework" you mean "easy to use tool" then I agree. Programmers are often the last people who should design tools - they dont bat an eye at having to edit a config file, tweak settings, install plugins, manage dependencies, run a compiler or other batch processing tool.

sitkack 7y ago

Programmers have a huge disdain for end user programming. Visual Basic, spreadsheets, even HyperCard. The vast majority of coding should be end user programming. The collective we just wants to own the tools and the jobs.

ojbyrne 7y ago
I am sympathetic to your sentiment, but the reason for the disdain is Professionalization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professionalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professionalization It's natural to want your job not to be turned over to the CEO's 14 year old son.
- sitkack 7y ago
  This has not occurred and is not occurring in programming. The CEOs 14 year old son is a straw boy.
  - jeegsy 7y ago
    > The CEOs 14 year old son is a straw boy. Tee Hee
pjmlp 7y ago
On the contrary, I loved VB and Delphi, and it is the reason why I mostly focused on Java and .NET as my daily tools. Developers are users as well, and I think too many fail to understand this. Whatever tooling makes it easier to develop for, means that I can focus on other parts of the problem. I don't miss working like I did during the late 80, early 90s. Our computers are so much better for them to be reduced to a green phosphor VT-100 terminal.
- Crinus 7y ago
  > Our computers are so much better for them to be reduced to a green phosphor VT-100 terminal. So much this. Every time someone harps about this or that great terminal application that looks worse than even MS-DOS applications from the late-80s (when most users had moved on from MDA cards) i die a little inside.

ericmcer 7y ago

The barrier to entry kinda needs to be high. The attention economy combined hordes of capable creative content producers means there is just not room for people who are not willing to work really hard at something. If you go back and watch some of the old flash stuff or play old flash games they are not good, they would be completely unnoticed today.

Fr0styMatt88 7y ago

There are options, at least if you want something to begin coding with; they're just a bit hard to find for the layperson that isn't following developer news. For example, apps that run directly on mobile platforms (specifically, ones that don't need to connect to the 'cloud' to do their compiling): - For iOS: Codea [1] (Lua), Continuous [2] (.NET), Swift Playgrounds [3] (Swift), Play.js [4] (Node.js + React Native) plus probably more (on that note, I really hope Continuous isn't abandoned, but it doesn't seem to have been updated in awhile). - For Android: AIDE [5], TIC-80 [6], probably others (I'm not as familiar) Moving up from mobile, you have FUZE4 Nintendo Switch [7] for the Nintendo Switch (excellent, but needs a bugfix update as there's lots of little annoyances). Probably the most kid-friendly thing there is right now IMHO, if you take into account the platform. On the PC, there's just a huge amount of stuff. Minecraft [8], GameMaker [9], GDevelop [10], Godot Engine [11]. These are at least suitable for early teens. [1] https://codea.io/ https://codea.io/ [2] http://continuous.codes/ http://continuous.codes/ [3] https://www.apple.com/au/swift/playgrounds/ https://www.apple.com/au/swift/playgrounds/ [4] https://playdotjs.com/ https://playdotjs.com/ [5] https://www.android-ide.com/ https://www.android-ide.com/ [6] https://tic.computer/ https://tic.computer/ [7] https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/fuze4-nintendo-switch/ https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/fuze4-nintendo-switch/ [8] https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/ https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/ [9] https://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker https://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker [10] https://gdevelop-app.com/ https://gdevelop-app.com/ [11] https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/ Note: Yes, obvious game-making bias here :)

wongarsu 7y ago
Also Unity's HTML export, and most notably Adobe Flash (which is "Flash but on a canvas" in the most literal way, even though the main demographic are now animators)
Sendotsh 7y ago
Game Maker is hugely underrated and often dismissed because of its name. It’s an incredibly powerful and easy to use game/interactive-app maker that can export packaged programs to Windows, OSX, Linux, and HTML5, then with additional licensing/fees to game consoles. It has a drag-and-drop mode for absolute beginners that can let someone with zero experience be creating simple games in their first weekend playing with it. Then it has GML mode which is their programming language with excellent documentation and a decent community cranking out tutorials and guides, which has put out some seriously legit indie games such as Red Strings Club, Hyperlight Drifter, and Hotline Miami. It’s also not just for games. It’s great for making interactive stories (I’ve made interactive kids books with it), HTML5 demos and interfaces, 2D physics demos, and even does basic 3D stuff. (Not affiliated just a big fan and use it extensively).

nabakin 7y ago

I was introduced to programming in middle school with Batch. A friend of mine was making a script to chat between computers and being able to make something interactive on a computer was so cool to me that I had him explain it. I learned Batch, then I learned Lua, Python, Java, and kept going. Minecraft which was really big at the time, drew me into making servers for my friends, which introduced me to plugins and programming them. I think there will always be easy ways to break into tech, they just might change from year to year.

bigiain 7y ago

I feel this too. As a kid, I could kinda understand how to go from programming in Basic to Pong or Space Invaders. A kid these days has _so_ many more expectations if they're wondering how Fortnite works... I had enough hubris as a 12/13 year old to write Space Invaders in ascii in Basic on an Osbourne2, and later to get a quite creditable imitation using sprites on an AppleII. I wonder if kids these days look at computers and think "I could do that" about anything they care about?

jonfw 7y ago
These days though- kids have access to much higher level languages and libraries and frameworks that can make some of these processes much easier. While it is much harder to understand the tech stack from the ground up- you can do a whole lot with the high level tools closer to the surface. Kids may not no how to go from BASIC to a video-game- but they don't have to write their games in BASIC. There are point and click game studios, there are really great physics engines available, there are libraries that attempt to make it simple. I remember learning how to build mods in minecraft ~10 years ago- there were tools out there that allowed you to make creatures or blocks that inherited behaviors programmed in other parts of the game- and you could do a lot with that!
- bigiain 7y ago
  Do you have any pointers to, or keywords I can google, for some of those point and click game studios? I've not tried to do anything like a game for decades, I'm kinda curious about that readily available tools kids could get their hands on these days... Closest I think I've come is launching Scratch from a RasPi's stock linux install...
  - mlyle 7y ago
    Scratch 3.0 (released Jan) is great, if you want the shallowest learning curve. I was astounded-- played with it for 2-3 hours to know what my kid was learning and in that time wrote three simple games. I've heard great things about 001 Game Creator (free for 7 days, then $60) for more substantial use.

asdfman123 7y ago

The barrier to entry is higher because people's expectations for what a website is is higher. You can still make crappy HTML pages with very basic inline JS, but if you're a kid starting out, that's not enough. You should probably learn a JS framework and some graphic design if you don't want it to be laughed at. Our field is just becoming more mature and advanced. Cars used to be easier to work on, too.