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Maybe the only free game in town. I remember Macromedia charging students about fifty bucks for Flash in the early 2000s, but memory can be unreliable. Skimmin

Maybe the only free game in town. I remember Macromedia charging students about fifty bucks for Flash in the early 2000s, but memory can be unreliable. Skimming through the Wayback Machine, I see it going for about twice that at my alma mater. I heard of Processing around 2007, and I loved that it was free, but I never really got into it. It felt academic, in a way, and it still does apart from p5.js. I don't mean "educational" or "scholastic", like Scratch or Mindstorms NXT. I mean that in the 2000s, Processing had a branding that reminded me of textbooks and whiteboards. It was cool the way the smart guy was cool in NUMB3RS. So taking up Processing after a couple years of Flash felt like ditching a wacky friend to go see a tutor. Since then it's become a more welcoming and accessible thing, and I'm glad it has.

k__ 5y ago
Ah, yes. I had a coworker in 2008/09 who studied at a macromedia university, and they were doing basically everything with Flash there. Sad story. The job he got with us didn't have anything to do with design, let alone Flash. He worked at the company for a few years and switched later, to do something that aligned more with his love for Flash, and then Apple killed it right away.
- rezmason 5y ago
  It's none of my business, but how has he been? Your mileage may vary, but I'm optimistic about the overall transferability of Flash skills to the Unity and web stacks at the very least.
rtpg 5y ago
One thing that is missing from Flash in there is the whole "you edit this thing visually, click on it and can attach a script onto it". Of course big "serious" flash projects would be more organized in how stuff happened but I think that Flash's success was from being this animation/drawing/moving making tool where you could add scripts, instead of this dynamic programming environment. "Make this movie interactive" has always been a bit easier than "make these words turn into drawings".

k__ 5y ago

Ah, yes. I had a coworker in 2008/09 who studied at a macromedia university, and they were doing basically everything with Flash there. Sad story. The job he got with us didn't have anything to do with design, let alone Flash. He worked at the company for a few years and switched later, to do something that aligned more with his love for Flash, and then Apple killed it right away.

rezmason 5y ago
It's none of my business, but how has he been? Your mileage may vary, but I'm optimistic about the overall transferability of Flash skills to the Unity and web stacks at the very least.

rtpg 5y ago

One thing that is missing from Flash in there is the whole "you edit this thing visually, click on it and can attach a script onto it". Of course big "serious" flash projects would be more organized in how stuff happened but I think that Flash's success was from being this animation/drawing/moving making tool where you could add scripts, instead of this dynamic programming environment. "Make this movie interactive" has always been a bit easier than "make these words turn into drawings".