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Is he ranting that Adobe Animate doesn't exist? Because it does and seamlessly exports HTML. I'm pretty sure if they aren't already you could get a bundler con

Is he ranting that Adobe Animate doesn't exist? Because it does and seamlessly exports HTML. I'm pretty sure if they aren't already you could get a bundler configuration for webpack that would build a single file data uris and all.

jan_Inkepa 6y ago
Lars is a game developer, so is presumably talking about interactive/multimedia content rather than pure animation. I fully agree with him that JS doesn't hold a candle to Flash even now (for rich media apps in the browser). But I don't think Flash could exist nowadays online anyway in the same way - the hardware ecosystem is much more diverse, you can't make a keyboard/mouse game and call it quits so easily, because people with tiny-touchscreen phones might also end up on your site. Trying to treat the web as a single platform is...it's a lot of ground to cover.
- gfxgirl 6y ago
  People still do this even without flash. Lots of people post tiny online games that require dragging the mouse with the left mouse button pressed and it's clear they forgot/ignored that the majority of people are on laptops
  - jan_Inkepa 6y ago
    That's true, though for me the different isn't as great as with pure touchscreens, and I always was willing to accept that as a downside of using a laptop rather than blaming the game itself. I guess nowadays that would be a harder psychological position to maintain with the ascendency of laptops. The cruellest thing for macbook users are games that require clicking both mouse-buttons simultaneously :P
larsiusprime 6y ago
I'm well aware the Adobe Animate still exists, a fact I'm glad for. I'm well aware that it can export to HTML5, and even Haxe/OpenFL, an open source project I've personally invested a ton of time and money into. It's great those initiatives exist, I've spent years of my career supporting them, but at replicating what Flash did in its prime, it's still not quite the same. The abstraction leaks around the edges and the community and singular simplicity and straightforwardness of what Flash had is long gone and a tiny open source community always heroically struggling for funding and contributions can't be expected to replicate it. Also, RE: Animate, updates randomly break things with previous versions, and being proprietary I have no idea how long Adobe is going to let it continue existing and keep it compatible with anything I might want to use it for. Anyways, the main point of the thread was just that the claims that HTML/JS was this perfect go to replacement for what we really valued about Flash just rings hollow to me 10 years later.
- CyberDildonics 6y ago
  That's just restating your claim, you still didn't explain what specifically you think is missing or impossible.
  - larsiusprime 6y ago
    My point is not that you can't reproduce any single thing with an HTML5/JS workflow. You certainly can. My point is that: The technical burden to do all the things you would typically use flash for (quickly create some complex animated vector art + stick some code on it + distribute it as a single file) is much higher and requires multiple toolsets that are not necessarily standardized or obvious to an entry level user. An entry level flash tutorial would show you how to do all these things and it would just work. An entry level HTML5/JS tutorial requires multiple dependencies and scary toolsets to a newcomer, assumes a lot more background technical skill, and is more likely to randomly break around the edges. There was a special happy circle of toolset + community that made something we've now lost, and I feel that the critics spent all their efforts on narrow technical points, and thus missed what really made things special for us.
    - CyberDildonics 6y ago
      The title says HTML5 but you seem to actually want better tools.
      - nicolas_t 6y ago
        The point is that flash was both the technology and the tools and that the tools for flash were refined and easy to use for a lot of people who were not necessarily deeply technical.
        CyberDildonics 6y ago
        HTML5 is just the technology, so saying it doesn't replicate flash's tools is not reasonable.
imbnwa 6y ago
I worked on porting a company's Flash library to Canvas, Animate is not that helpful here, it spits out an IIFE that calls into their CreateJs library but you just can't fire and forget because Canvas demands a lot of hand-tuning if you're doing anything other than banner ads to get the same performance profile and Animate won't help you do that work. This is particularly a problem with static images, text, opacity IIRC. Literally every tip you see on MDN for Canvas performance you will not get in that Animate Canvas output. Jus as an example, Flash is able to redraw only whats needed on the screen whereas Canvas doesn't do this and works like a game where it blows away the whole screen every frame (assuming you're calling clearRect), hence why its best practice to use multiple Canvas elements, off-screen Canvas elements, etc but again, Animate doesn't do that work for you. And up until the EOL of IE11 next summer you have to manually alter the output to make use of blend modes, which people use a lot of in Flash, if you want full browser support, which is pertinent in domains like healthcare.
- daveoc64 6y ago
  There is no end of life date for IE11 next year. Internet Explorer is supported for as long as the OS is, and as such, will see support until at least 2029 on Windows Server 2019. It wouldn't surprise me if the next version of Windows (desktop or server) also includes IE, fully supported for its 10 year lifecycle. There were a lot of clickbait articles in the past year about various Microsoft services dropping support for IE, but it will still be part of Windows, and still get security updates.
  - imbnwa 6y ago
    Thanks for the correction, no blend mode ever it is

jan_Inkepa 6y ago

Lars is a game developer, so is presumably talking about interactive/multimedia content rather than pure animation. I fully agree with him that JS doesn't hold a candle to Flash even now (for rich media apps in the browser). But I don't think Flash could exist nowadays online anyway in the same way - the hardware ecosystem is much more diverse, you can't make a keyboard/mouse game and call it quits so easily, because people with tiny-touchscreen phones might also end up on your site. Trying to treat the web as a single platform is...it's a lot of ground to cover.

gfxgirl 6y ago
People still do this even without flash. Lots of people post tiny online games that require dragging the mouse with the left mouse button pressed and it's clear they forgot/ignored that the majority of people are on laptops
- jan_Inkepa 6y ago
  That's true, though for me the different isn't as great as with pure touchscreens, and I always was willing to accept that as a downside of using a laptop rather than blaming the game itself. I guess nowadays that would be a harder psychological position to maintain with the ascendency of laptops. The cruellest thing for macbook users are games that require clicking both mouse-buttons simultaneously :P

larsiusprime 6y ago

I'm well aware the Adobe Animate still exists, a fact I'm glad for. I'm well aware that it can export to HTML5, and even Haxe/OpenFL, an open source project I've personally invested a ton of time and money into. It's great those initiatives exist, I've spent years of my career supporting them, but at replicating what Flash did in its prime, it's still not quite the same. The abstraction leaks around the edges and the community and singular simplicity and straightforwardness of what Flash had is long gone and a tiny open source community always heroically struggling for funding and contributions can't be expected to replicate it. Also, RE: Animate, updates randomly break things with previous versions, and being proprietary I have no idea how long Adobe is going to let it continue existing and keep it compatible with anything I might want to use it for. Anyways, the main point of the thread was just that the claims that HTML/JS was this perfect go to replacement for what we really valued about Flash just rings hollow to me 10 years later.

CyberDildonics 6y ago
That's just restating your claim, you still didn't explain what specifically you think is missing or impossible.
- larsiusprime 6y ago
  My point is not that you can't reproduce any single thing with an HTML5/JS workflow. You certainly can. My point is that: The technical burden to do all the things you would typically use flash for (quickly create some complex animated vector art + stick some code on it + distribute it as a single file) is much higher and requires multiple toolsets that are not necessarily standardized or obvious to an entry level user. An entry level flash tutorial would show you how to do all these things and it would just work. An entry level HTML5/JS tutorial requires multiple dependencies and scary toolsets to a newcomer, assumes a lot more background technical skill, and is more likely to randomly break around the edges. There was a special happy circle of toolset + community that made something we've now lost, and I feel that the critics spent all their efforts on narrow technical points, and thus missed what really made things special for us.
  - CyberDildonics 6y ago
    The title says HTML5 but you seem to actually want better tools.
    - nicolas_t 6y ago
      The point is that flash was both the technology and the tools and that the tools for flash were refined and easy to use for a lot of people who were not necessarily deeply technical.
      - CyberDildonics 6y ago
        HTML5 is just the technology, so saying it doesn't replicate flash's tools is not reasonable.

imbnwa 6y ago

I worked on porting a company's Flash library to Canvas, Animate is not that helpful here, it spits out an IIFE that calls into their CreateJs library but you just can't fire and forget because Canvas demands a lot of hand-tuning if you're doing anything other than banner ads to get the same performance profile and Animate won't help you do that work. This is particularly a problem with static images, text, opacity IIRC. Literally every tip you see on MDN for Canvas performance you will not get in that Animate Canvas output. Jus as an example, Flash is able to redraw only whats needed on the screen whereas Canvas doesn't do this and works like a game where it blows away the whole screen every frame (assuming you're calling clearRect), hence why its best practice to use multiple Canvas elements, off-screen Canvas elements, etc but again, Animate doesn't do that work for you. And up until the EOL of IE11 next summer you have to manually alter the output to make use of blend modes, which people use a lot of in Flash, if you want full browser support, which is pertinent in domains like healthcare.

daveoc64 6y ago
There is no end of life date for IE11 next year. Internet Explorer is supported for as long as the OS is, and as such, will see support until at least 2029 on Windows Server 2019. It wouldn't surprise me if the next version of Windows (desktop or server) also includes IE, fully supported for its 10 year lifecycle. There were a lot of clickbait articles in the past year about various Microsoft services dropping support for IE, but it will still be part of Windows, and still get security updates.
- imbnwa 6y ago
  Thanks for the correction, no blend mode ever it is