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Comment by moolcool

7 hours ago

I think it's taken for granted just how good flash was. It gets hated on a lot because it was proprietary and insecure, but it's really impressive that they had a system where teenagers could make genuinely good games and animations, and then play them in web browsers on machines with Pentium IIs. There's nothing else like that today.

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moolcool

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idreyn  6 hours ago

Flash created a medium. The particular genius of the authoring tool gave rise to a whole style of animation and game and thing-in-between that only existed in its time and could have only been created with the tool at hand. Software should aspire to this.

  • tombert  6 hours ago

    Well said, and I completely agree.

    Since Flash was an animation-first piece of software that still had a fairly robust scripting system, it was able to create very unique and interesting pieces of media that can kind of only exist as they are.

    People aren't making full on TV cartoons in Construct or GameMaker. This isn't a dig at those tools, they're good software, but the animation parts of them are targeted much more towards "animation for games".

tombert  7 hours ago

I think Adobe should have open-sourced the Flash player like 20 years ago.

If they had done that, then it could have been incorporated into the web standards (or at least something somewhat inspired by it). Instead it took like 10+ years for web standards to catch up, Flash Player got crappier and crappier and eventually murdered in 2020.

If they had FOSS'd it, Adobe could still be the de facto leader of web-authoring tech.