[mclightning]

I was a huge Flash nerd, all the way since Macromedia Flash 5. I learnt programming with Flash 5 and action script. I have been at it until Flash 8. Then I stopped putting effort to keep-up and eventually Flash died.

Something was lost in the internet culture. Flash was the language of web art. I don't know what is the new language for that anymore.

If anyone knows, please do tell me. WebGL? Any WebGL-powered framework? What is it?

[BoppreH]

My feeling is that we won't see another Flash because the artists went to video platforms[1], and the developers are trying to make money on the app stores[2].

Flash was the most attention grabbing medium at the time (because of bandwidth constraints), and making money was not the expectation, so the two groups flocked together and created all those wonderful animations and games for free. I don't see Flash, or anything like it, winning against TikTok and app store cash grabs anytime soon.

[1] Exhibit A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN92RC0Lmd4 . Distinct visual style? Check. Absurdist? Check. High effort? Check. Niche? Currently 3k views, check. Available for free? Check. 15 years ago this would be on Newgrounds.

[2] Exhibit B: https://play.google.com/store/games . Hundreds of thousands of simple games. 15 years ago, the less greedy version of this would be on Kongregate.

[rchaud]

Regarding the Play store, I just see waves and waves of the exact same game with different character textures applied.

The difference with Flash was that it was usually the work of a solo developer of a very small team, so they could be unique in what they made (not dismissing that Flash game had clones too). The mobile app landscape is different in that conformity = $$$. These apps are soulless, they have no incentive to build something that's not a Clash of Clans / Temple Run / Candy Crush type game that's inundated with microtransactions.

[grishka]

Nothing. The ease with which Flash allowed one to create all these web experiences, with little to no programming, is still unmatched to this day.

[LeifCarrotson]

I feel like the same is true of Visual Basic 6. (Excuse me, I'll wait....)

OK, now that we've all calmed back down, VB6 has been unmatched in the way that it allowed someone with zero experience to drag-and-drop and write in what looks like pseudocode to get some little business widget built. Yes, you can engineer something with better architecture that's less likely to paint you into a `DoEvents()` corner. Yes, the mere existence of settings like `On Error Resume Next`, `Option Strict Off`, and `Option Explicit Off` are anathema to correctness, security (lol), and robustness. No, if you expect support for Unicode or 64-bit operations, it wasn't built for that.

Many people loathe Flash for its security vulnerabilities, or VB6 because of experiences with poorly-written code at businesses that should have had a 'real programmer.' And today, a tool that made the same design decisions that Flash and VB6 did - pandering to novices who weren't willing to go to the effort to do things right - would be derided as a toy, as unusable for real work outside of sandboxed demos. But both were instrumental as stepping stones in the early 2000s to transform non-computer-literate individuals and businesses into creators and users.

[grishka]

The vulnerabilities in Flash were not in the SWF format or the AS APIs or their intended behavior. That was all rock-solid. They were in one particular proprietary implementation of Flash player. Ruffle won't have any memory-related vulnerabilities to begin with by virtue of being written in a memory-safe language.

[camhenlin]

My first job was writing VBA programs on top of extremely complicated Excel 97 spreadsheets to prevent input errors and provide a cleaner UI. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ve ever been as productive as I was at that job. It was just so straightforward to crank out decent looking forms and so intuitive for a fresh new dev

[pixelrevision]

Unity is a really good alternative. Flash kinda went sideways and started really trying to lean into the Java crowd with flex. Unity is more like what would have happened if Flash heavily leaned into what it did well.

[grishka]

Unity is a bad alternative because it requires programming. It's also much more complex since it's a game engine, not a scriptable vector animation thing.

With Flash, you could just follow some tutorials and make something nice in no time, fully understanding what you're doing.

Flash didn't "lean into" Flex. Flex was an Eclipse-based IDE and a set of libraries that some people used for some projects. It was specifically aimed at building apps. There were layouts, controls and all that. There was a list view with cell reuse, in 2008! It was much more like Android layout system then what the web had and still has. Flex was a tool that's very good for some jobs and completely unfit for others — like any other tool, really.

[rchaud]

> Flash was the language of web art. I don't know what is the new language for that anymore.

Nothing. Flash left a gaping void in Internet creativity that has gone unfilled. We don't call it 'art' anymore, we call it 'content', aka grist for walled-garden mills of Youtube and Instagram and Tiktok.

[AshleysBrain]

We make Construct Animate which can do Flash-style animation right in the browser: https://www.construct.net/en/animation-software

[dwild]

At first glance it seems to only support bitmap? I means it does seems great, but I believe a big part of Flash is the vectorial format, it's not baked into the image, and it does look "good" in many resolutions. You can iterate quickly that way.

[whywhywhywhy]

> Flash was the language of web art. I don't know what is the new language for that anymore

P5, which while excellent and better than flash for many reasons it’s not the same thing.

The true beauty of flash was seeing the cool games and animations online a kid could pirate a copy of flash and then the way the tech worked it lulled you in with simple animation tools but you were forced to interact with code to control the play state.

This meant a percentage dug deeper and could eventually make games and more advanced things.

[rchaud]

p5.js is to Flash....what D3.js is to making a bar chart in Excel. Here is the code required to just render a circle in p5:

>function draw() {

> stroke(50);

> fill(100);

> ellipse(x, y, 24, 24); }

In Flash you would just click the Oval icon and draw one.

[whywhywhywhy]

True true, now draw a ellipse programmatically or line that follows the mouse in Flash and you'll see this flip round and P5 is easier.

Both have their benefits, P5 is far superior for creating interactive digital art or creative tooling. Flash is far better at creating intricate animations.

[woogley]

There is nothing like Flash IMO. Closest we have in the modern day is Unity and Godot

[hutzlibu]

Closer would be Adobe Animate, the official successor, but it is really not the same experience.

Wick editor is nice, but developement is on hold. It is open source, so maybe something will still come out if it.

[woogley]

Yeah I mean more from a mindshare / value to your personal portfolio pov. But still, what we have today is just an approximation of Flash in 2000s

[rchaud]

Tumult Hype on Mac as well. Point-and-click, drag 'n drop animation and website design. Also supports custom HTML/CSS/JS.

[mattl]

I wish Macromedia had been able to get Flash to work without a plug-in. Flash was missing on Unix outside of Mac OS X and only i386 Linux.

[throwaway5947]

Adobe Animate.