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It also signaled the end of the golden era of amateur 2D games and drawn movies (i.e. what Newgrounds was famous for). I feel like the modern creativity has be

It also signaled the end of the golden era of amateur 2D games and drawn movies (i.e. what Newgrounds was famous for). I feel like the modern creativity has been channeled into YouTube, IG, and TikTok. Not as much interactive content, unfortunately.

amatecha 6y ago
Yup, the advent of Flash animations was the one time that almost all of my friends and I were able to produce _some_ kind of animation. We all had silly little things we put on Newgrounds, when none of us (well, except me) had any prior animation experience. It was a pretty empowering experience and I remember the relative ease with which we could produce some pretty nice-looking stuff. Of course, that's about all I miss about Flash, but it was a really great time while it lasted. :)
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
Flash sucked for a lot of things but what it was an unsung hero for was actually being an outlet and onramp for adolescent creativity. Children online during that era were not just staring into YouTube videos served up by the algorithm they were clicking around Flash compilation sites with animations, games etc and many would eventually pirate a copy of Flash. The beauty of the tool, especially in the AS2 era was you could open it up and start animating straight away but then to add sounds or loops you had to add little bits of code into the timeline. This was a perfect way for many to start dabbling with and understanding coding.
- detritus 6y ago
  'Adolescent' seems a bit dismissive, although I'm sure you didn't mean it that way. Flash opened up digital experience creation for a multitude of people of all ages - th emost interactively interesting web rode off the back of Flash for a good decade and more. Personally I never much liked Flash, and only resorted to it for things that were out of reach of my meagre capabilities, adding to HTML etc.
- asdff 6y ago
  I think this is a little dismissive of kids today. How many kids actually bothered pirating a copy of Flash vs. just mindless playing bloons tower defense? You could argue that this low stakes gaming has been replaced by phone apps. But kids today are learning from what they watch on youtube: far more kids are making their own videos for their youtube channel or tiktok account and learning about av production in the process, than kids learning flash programming 15 years ago. Sure it starts small with your phone camera, but look at the production quality of some of these influencers: they are investing in good cameras, microphones, lighting, sound proofing, editing software, and that is something you need to learn a little bit about video production to effectively set up, and these are still marketable skills.
  - oliveshell 6y ago
    > How many kids actually bothered pirating a copy of Flash? Lots. Lots and lots and lots. If you’d spent time back then looking at new submissions to the Newgrounds Flash Portal, you’d have seen how true that was. I knew a guy who became a professional 3D animator, and Flash was what got him into animation in the first place. It was bigger than you think. YouTube is not the same. Video production is a marketable skill, sure, but in my opinion a more boring, less expressive, less creative one.
    - dannyw 6y ago
      Yeah, lots. Back in my primary school days, 3 of us had a pirated copy of Adobe Flash, met up, and tried to learn actionscript and animation after school.
mortenjorck 6y ago
In some ways, I think the interactive component has migrated to Unity. It’s in no way a direct successor, to be sure; even with the Unity web player there’s nothing approaching the immediacy of Flash's authoring and playing experience. Browsing Itch.io does channel some of those early-2000s Newgrounds vibes, though.
johannes1234321 6y ago
Yeah, back in the days Flash was fun for creating simple interactive animations. I yet haven't found a good alternative. HTML+SVG+CSS+JS+Canvas+WegGL+... can do all the things, but there's no good and simple to use editor. For pure animations I recently found Synfig, which to me has a steeper learning curve and misses the interactivity Flash provided. In a way similar to the missing replacement of Delphi in the Web - simple tools for creating quite acceptable results quickly. All the tools I found till today either produces only crap, which falls apart quickly or one has to make it a real project with proper coding and everything.
- narag 6y ago
  Do you remember IntraBuilder? https://www.drdobbs.com/borlands-intrabuilder-10/184415559 https://www.drdobbs.com/borlands-intrabuilder-10/184415559 It was a flop, but they did try.
  - johannes1234321 6y ago
    The nice thing about Delphi was that one could start easily with a toy project and then turn it into a quite high quality product. With solutions like IntraBuilder one is tied into a tight framework, which integrates only in limited ways to the Web. The closest thing I know is Oracle Apex, which has its flaws, lock-in and costs $$$$ but some results I saw are quite nice and as a user hard to identify as being created by such a tool.
- roblabla 6y ago
  I mean, Adobe Animate (the new name for Adobe Flash) still exists, and can target HTML/JS/Canvas/WebGL. It still supports ActionScript 3.0, so the same platform that could be used to create animations and interactive games should still be usable.
  - johannes1234321 6y ago
    "should be" or "is"? Serious question. It's a while since I tried last and results were less than encouraging. But maybe it improved. (And then 20$/month is cheap for professional usage, but notable for fun or student projects)
rezmason 6y ago
> I feel like the modern creativity has been channeled into YouTube, IG, and TikTok. Not as much interactive content, unfortunately. Furthermore, all of these are privately controlled platforms. The notion of a web presence on today's web is dominated by behemoth social sites and their EULAs. Even if we create interesting interactive things, they're excluded from the primary modes of engagement.
lattalayta 6y ago
I got into programming via Macromedia Flash, which was then purchased by Adobe and integrated into Creative Suite. It was pretty empowering to be able to quickly draw graphics on the stage, animate them with tweening, and then have the ability to add an identifier to an object to reference it with code. I could easily switch from visually animating something, to then trigger animations with code and callbacks, to getting more advanced and making full blown interfaces, games, and interactive content. Additionally, it was amazing that whatever you created in Flash could be exported and published to the web relatively easily. And it would look the same on all browsers. This was during the time where browser CSS support was abysmal and most web developers would spend their time exporting 9-slice images from Photoshop to be used as background images in tables to get rounded corners.

amatecha 6y ago

Yup, the advent of Flash animations was the one time that almost all of my friends and I were able to produce _some_ kind of animation. We all had silly little things we put on Newgrounds, when none of us (well, except me) had any prior animation experience. It was a pretty empowering experience and I remember the relative ease with which we could produce some pretty nice-looking stuff. Of course, that's about all I miss about Flash, but it was a really great time while it lasted. :)

whywhywhywhy 6y ago

Flash sucked for a lot of things but what it was an unsung hero for was actually being an outlet and onramp for adolescent creativity. Children online during that era were not just staring into YouTube videos served up by the algorithm they were clicking around Flash compilation sites with animations, games etc and many would eventually pirate a copy of Flash. The beauty of the tool, especially in the AS2 era was you could open it up and start animating straight away but then to add sounds or loops you had to add little bits of code into the timeline. This was a perfect way for many to start dabbling with and understanding coding.

detritus 6y ago
'Adolescent' seems a bit dismissive, although I'm sure you didn't mean it that way. Flash opened up digital experience creation for a multitude of people of all ages - th emost interactively interesting web rode off the back of Flash for a good decade and more. Personally I never much liked Flash, and only resorted to it for things that were out of reach of my meagre capabilities, adding to HTML etc.
asdff 6y ago
I think this is a little dismissive of kids today. How many kids actually bothered pirating a copy of Flash vs. just mindless playing bloons tower defense? You could argue that this low stakes gaming has been replaced by phone apps. But kids today are learning from what they watch on youtube: far more kids are making their own videos for their youtube channel or tiktok account and learning about av production in the process, than kids learning flash programming 15 years ago. Sure it starts small with your phone camera, but look at the production quality of some of these influencers: they are investing in good cameras, microphones, lighting, sound proofing, editing software, and that is something you need to learn a little bit about video production to effectively set up, and these are still marketable skills.
- oliveshell 6y ago
  > How many kids actually bothered pirating a copy of Flash? Lots. Lots and lots and lots. If you’d spent time back then looking at new submissions to the Newgrounds Flash Portal, you’d have seen how true that was. I knew a guy who became a professional 3D animator, and Flash was what got him into animation in the first place. It was bigger than you think. YouTube is not the same. Video production is a marketable skill, sure, but in my opinion a more boring, less expressive, less creative one.
  - dannyw 6y ago
    Yeah, lots. Back in my primary school days, 3 of us had a pirated copy of Adobe Flash, met up, and tried to learn actionscript and animation after school.

mortenjorck 6y ago

In some ways, I think the interactive component has migrated to Unity. It’s in no way a direct successor, to be sure; even with the Unity web player there’s nothing approaching the immediacy of Flash's authoring and playing experience. Browsing Itch.io does channel some of those early-2000s Newgrounds vibes, though.

johannes1234321 6y ago

Yeah, back in the days Flash was fun for creating simple interactive animations. I yet haven't found a good alternative. HTML+SVG+CSS+JS+Canvas+WegGL+... can do all the things, but there's no good and simple to use editor. For pure animations I recently found Synfig, which to me has a steeper learning curve and misses the interactivity Flash provided. In a way similar to the missing replacement of Delphi in the Web - simple tools for creating quite acceptable results quickly. All the tools I found till today either produces only crap, which falls apart quickly or one has to make it a real project with proper coding and everything.

narag 6y ago
Do you remember IntraBuilder? https://www.drdobbs.com/borlands-intrabuilder-10/184415559 https://www.drdobbs.com/borlands-intrabuilder-10/184415559 It was a flop, but they did try.
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  The nice thing about Delphi was that one could start easily with a toy project and then turn it into a quite high quality product. With solutions like IntraBuilder one is tied into a tight framework, which integrates only in limited ways to the Web. The closest thing I know is Oracle Apex, which has its flaws, lock-in and costs $$$$ but some results I saw are quite nice and as a user hard to identify as being created by such a tool.
roblabla 6y ago
I mean, Adobe Animate (the new name for Adobe Flash) still exists, and can target HTML/JS/Canvas/WebGL. It still supports ActionScript 3.0, so the same platform that could be used to create animations and interactive games should still be usable.
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  "should be" or "is"? Serious question. It's a while since I tried last and results were less than encouraging. But maybe it improved. (And then 20$/month is cheap for professional usage, but notable for fun or student projects)

rezmason 6y ago

> I feel like the modern creativity has been channeled into YouTube, IG, and TikTok. Not as much interactive content, unfortunately. Furthermore, all of these are privately controlled platforms. The notion of a web presence on today's web is dominated by behemoth social sites and their EULAs. Even if we create interesting interactive things, they're excluded from the primary modes of engagement.

lattalayta 6y ago

I got into programming via Macromedia Flash, which was then purchased by Adobe and integrated into Creative Suite. It was pretty empowering to be able to quickly draw graphics on the stage, animate them with tweening, and then have the ability to add an identifier to an object to reference it with code. I could easily switch from visually animating something, to then trigger animations with code and callbacks, to getting more advanced and making full blown interfaces, games, and interactive content. Additionally, it was amazing that whatever you created in Flash could be exported and published to the web relatively easily. And it would look the same on all browsers. This was during the time where browser CSS support was abysmal and most web developers would spend their time exporting 9-slice images from Photoshop to be used as background images in tables to get rounded corners.