This was an excellent tool for beginner 2D animators with fundamentals of keyframes and tweening built-in. More powerful animators could use Actionscript and audio tracks to create entire presentations. It was fast on slow connections and supported many browser features. Macromedia Flash no doubt built Newgrounds into a behemoth of animated content.
To think it all really started from the gerbil in a microwave and the frog in a blender (both with attitudes) spreading like wildfire through email forwards (Joe Cartoon.)
I love Flash, it was awesome. But what pains me the most is that only recently I found out about Shockwave. I mean the Director application. I always though Shockwave was a part of Flash. But turns out it was a separate thing all along!
Director was such a fun app for creating CD-ROM content back in the day! I still have fond memories of learning the Lingo scripting language inside Director to make interactive "multimedia" apps, then uploading them to the web and playing them in the browser using the Shockwave Player. It felt like magic at the time.
Custom Flash players were actually relatively common in game development during the mid to late 2000s, as Flash provided a ready-to-go authoring solution for UI and 2D animation that artists were already familiar with. Autodesk's Scaleform was probably the most popular implementation but a number of AAA developers had their own in-house libraries similar to Doom 3's; some of them, such as Konami's "AFP" [1], are still in use to this day (the latest game to use it, Sound Voltex Nabla, was released last month).
For folks who are curious about what drawing in FutureWave SmartSketch was like (it was one of my favourite PenPoint apps, and I also bought copies for Mac OS and Windows), see the opensource Wick Editor:
Flash feels like some technology from the future that was taken away from us from all those anal people that "need to do it the right way" (see yesterday's story about converting a monolith to micro-services: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46469845)
you could get so much done with flash which is just so cumbersome with javascript/html5. Simple things, like click on an object and play a sound, I tried to do this yesterday and it was pretty complex (break your animation into a sprite sheet, find something to work with sprites, find something to play an mp3 on click, make sure it all syncs up...)
Not to mention just having a default timeline/tweening system to work with.
None of this really matters, because if flash was still around, I still wouldn't be willing to pay Adobe $50 a month to use it.
There were various details in here that I forgot (or never knew).
A few notes:
The iPhone was what put the final nail in Flash’s coffin.
Prior to that, and despite its many flaws, the Flash Player was the only true, write-once, run anywhere platform.
Quokka sports was a big deal at some point.
No mention of South Park?!
The Flash Forward conference and Lynda.com were also big.
Things did begin to fall apart under Adobe, but the article might be a little too harsh about it.
I knew the player team before and after the acquisition and it wasn’t abandoned.
The work they did was extremely difficult and no one else has ever managed to produce such a capable and tiny executable that runs on all the things before or since.
I got flash 5 as a hand me down from my uncle when i was ~11. There was nothing more fun to do on the computer than make cartoons and build imaginary UIs for games i didn't know how to make.
I have ever since found most animation packages that I've tried lacking. Having such dead simple tweening and easing was really incredible for a beginner. Now i know how to do all that in AE but it's way more complicated
17 comments
[ 20.9 ms ] story [ 339 ms ] threadTo think it all really started from the gerbil in a microwave and the frog in a blender (both with attitudes) spreading like wildfire through email forwards (Joe Cartoon.)
https://archive.org/details/MacAddict-004-199612/page/n77/mo...
.spl, there you go. For "SPLash", I guess, or "Splash PLayer".
You could call it Lightweight Scaleform. This same codebase was used in RAGE.
[1]: https://github.com/DragonMinded/bemaniutils/blob/trunk/beman...
https://www.wickeditor.com/editor/
Here’s a screencast of one of my favorites in 2009:
https://x.com/efortis/status/1879712687896289471
you could get so much done with flash which is just so cumbersome with javascript/html5. Simple things, like click on an object and play a sound, I tried to do this yesterday and it was pretty complex (break your animation into a sprite sheet, find something to work with sprites, find something to play an mp3 on click, make sure it all syncs up...)
Not to mention just having a default timeline/tweening system to work with.
None of this really matters, because if flash was still around, I still wouldn't be willing to pay Adobe $50 a month to use it.
There were various details in here that I forgot (or never knew).
A few notes:
The iPhone was what put the final nail in Flash’s coffin.
Prior to that, and despite its many flaws, the Flash Player was the only true, write-once, run anywhere platform.
Quokka sports was a big deal at some point.
No mention of South Park?!
The Flash Forward conference and Lynda.com were also big.
Things did begin to fall apart under Adobe, but the article might be a little too harsh about it.
I knew the player team before and after the acquisition and it wasn’t abandoned.
The work they did was extremely difficult and no one else has ever managed to produce such a capable and tiny executable that runs on all the things before or since.
I have ever since found most animation packages that I've tried lacking. Having such dead simple tweening and easing was really incredible for a beginner. Now i know how to do all that in AE but it's way more complicated