Flash is Dead! Long live Flash!
Flash never died. It lives on.
If there is one thing that really bothers me it is the current web and app community’s short-term memory. The eulogizing and hostility that has greeted the “Death Of Flash” misses the point entirely. The point is this: A band of crazies, cast-offs and screw-ups fundamentally changed how we communicate and design in the digital space.
Think of something, anything, that you find to be amazing or cutting edge in the current digital space and I can assure you, somebody in the Flash community had already done it.
Like to use page curls to flip a page on a web site? Take a look at Eric Natzke’s work with Shrek.
Think coding up shapes, motion and colour is pretty cool? You might want to check out what Josh Davis was doing with Generative Art and how Mario Klingemann and Ralph Hauert brought the underground Berlin Coding movement to the Flash community.
Think you are doing some amazing effects with code? Check out the awesome work done by Colin Mook, Jared Tarbell, James Paterson. Brendan Dawes, Keith Peters, Gmunk, Sam Wan, Seb Lee Delisle and others.
Love how easy it is to add video or motion to a web page or app? You might want to learn about the work of Hillman Curtis and Yugo Nakamura.
Think programmatic animation is something new? Locate a copy of New Masters of Flash from friendsofED - any copy between 2000 and 2004- and you will see examples of projects that were cutting edge then and rather commonplace today.
Think designing apps for devices is difficult? You might want to check out how easy you now have it by opening Device Central in an old version of Flash and, while you are at it, do a Google search for Rich Internet Applications to discover your mobile stuff is either not as cutting edge as you may think or that the foundations for your work were laid here.
We all talk about community but we seem to ignore the work of Lynda Weinman, Stuart McBride, John Davies and Shawn Pucknell to foster community and share knowledge through FlashForward, SparkEurope, Flash on the Beach and Flash in The Can (FITC). From their efforts, Flash Community groups sprung up around the world and gave artists and developers a platform to share and highlight their work.
Yet, for some odd reason, the history and innovators from that time, are either unknown or simply ignored. That is just plain wrong. They should be acknowledged and celebrated.
YouTube was built on the Flash platform. The Cartoon Network had shows entirely constructed in Flash. The cool screens on the bridge of many an outer space movie and TV show were Flash animations. Flash Video kicked off a huge revolution around the inclusion of video on the web and that revolution continues to this day. For those interested, it was Hillman Curtis who discovered you could rotoscope a video, throw it on a Flash timeline and play the clip. That was the genesis of web video. For those of you who recently discovered Zoom and other applications, none of this would have been possible without the broad adoption of the Flash Media Server.
So here’s to all of those that got you here. Their work lives on. Whether you know it or not.
Hi all! I started Flash 5.5 with AS1 on IE5.5! I always use flash (Animate) to build vector animations that play automatically on browsers and mobiles. It looks very good! Here is an animation example:?https://abpost-solutions.fr/externalisation-de-vos-envois-de-courrier/
ENTERPRISE UX UI, SERVICE DESIGNER | Leading Data Driven App Journeys to Drive Productivity, Growth | B2B Cloud Sass | Usability | Design System Thinking | Dashboards | FinTech AI/ML | Innovation Process, Buy in
4 年Thanks Tom for writing this … One of my first jobs as an Independent was to develop Indycar’s Toronto Indy eCommerce race site. I used Flash to help re-create the race experience to sell tickets to the 3 day event. Embedding Flash audio, users could hear the excitement created by the sound of cars racing down the track. You could mouse over one of the first interactive stadium maps to see the view from your seat, and then buy your ticket online via the Ticketmaster, as it was the first implementations of their online ticketing API (so they told me). The site sold over a million dollars in tickets. It was less than half a MB in total. Loved Flash as it's integration with HTML and JavaScript was so easy. That was over 20 years ago. I wish FITC was around back then as I would have love to give a talk about it.
Innovating UX for Google Meet
4 年Flash kickstarted a new age of creativity, on the web and beyond. Mostly because everybody found a way to use it, regardless of specialisation, and everything was possible. I started out using it as a designer and still used it as a scientist, thanks to its rich possibilities. Web standards and JavaScript have gradually caught up (though not quite), but it seems to me that creativity and quality are still behind what we saw at the height of Flash's use. Incidentally, I find myself writing this wearing one of my Flash on the Beach t-shirts, which, I need to tell John Davies, are as high-quality and long-lasting as the impact of those mind-blowing events.
Advisory Content Developer, Knowledge Creation at Kinaxis
4 年Your observations could not be more accurate, and are evident in so many facets of life.