Comment by Brajeshwar

1 year ago

My team and I were ghost developers to many companies, developers, and book authors in the hay days of Macromedia/Adobe Flash.

We were approached to build a bunch of learning lessons for teachers to teach kids - primarily focusing on human anatomy. Instead of building separate lessons, we built a generator tool for the teachers to drag and drop various combinations and permutations that produce almost infinite lesson variations.

The end customer was Pearson Publishing, and I heard they won awards and stuff. Our client was a good person and even paid us extra for doing the better version of the product they had in mind.

That tool was like this and a few others, as mentioned in the comments. But all in ActionScript Flash, complete with sounds, laughter tracks, and ever-expanding sprites of body parts. It was one fun and fulfiling product.

I miss Flash and all the cool capabilities it had. At a previous company, we built a tool that would allow a teacher to record a video review of a student's animation work, while showing, scrubbing and annotating that work simultaneously. On playback, the annotations would be synced with the video. Good luck pulling that off with Javascript.

  • There's some work on this on the web space - our company is doing something not too dissimilar using the still experimental API called WebCodecs.

    And that pretty much says everything unfortunately - it's still an experimental API with limited availability.

    You can do some parts of this using Canvas[0] but there's lots of caveats.

    [0] https://github.com/bwasti/mebm/tree/main