Flash: Saviour of the Universe?
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- mikotondria30
It was, totally the savior of my universe.
I remember clear as anything when I first opened up my trial, and after working through the tutes in about 10 minutes sketched out our record label's logo, and shape tweened it into something else, which then got other shapes and lines tweened in, background color change, text box in, buttons in, sound plays - done.
I thought it was fucking magic and I'll stand by the idea that no other piece of software since will provide as many people with such inspiration and desire to innovate and create. It changed my life, and millions of other peoples, and as badly as it was subsequently used - by all of us, myself included, there won't be anything with that impact for a long time.
- prophet0
i remember being blown away by the potential of flash back then. like when the barney's site was reworked (by kioken) and you could drag the nav around! or the bad boy records site with the side scroll and element dragging. and then the subtle use of flash like with the nike enjoy the weather site. and of course, praystation. and countless others.
web design had all these new possibilities, it was very exciting. if you were a {1337 h4xx0r} web nerd.
- prophet0
also, i remember getting amped over the 'seasons' at volumeone.com
- hellz yes.
http://volumeone.com…
prophet - fuck yeah... i studied every pixel of every season.showpony
- *high fivesprophet
- hellz yes.
- instrmntl0
Flash Back: Demand Up in Engineering Specialty
- kpl0
It had such potential back then. All of it wasted it seems.
- ukit0
Not really, just turned out that the experimental vision, cool as it is, isn't what people like to spend their time on all day.
- showpony0
flash is always dissed by people who don't know how to use it. with this endless sea of sameness these days, i miss the experimental days of flash... at least then we were asking questions of the medium...
- same. i miss all the experimentation.airey
- +1colab
- <Continuity
- ukit0
- egosmoke0
I still remember sitting in my studio in the dark with headphones, completely engulfed in the Donnie Darko site from hi-res. To this day I still don't think any other site has affected me the way that did. Good times.
- Continuity0
^
'Flash has become synonymous with animation on the Internet. It's even possible that Flash Player is now the most widely distributed piece of software on the Internet-ahead of Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and Real Player.'Aaah, those were the days.
- ukit0
haha, Real is actually headquartered right down the street from me, they are still going (but who knows for how long). I've ran into their CEO a couple times.
- dijitaq0
i graduated during the a political uncertainty and the economy took a big hit, especially in the real estate sector. having gone to school to earn my degree in architecture, i was looking at a prospect of unemployment. about a year before i graduated, i was browsing through some examples of flash website and i was totally blown away. i picked up a bootleg copy of flash and taught myself flash and html.
a few months before i graduated, i saw an opening for a flash developer and applied. i bullshit through the interview and created a small website with some cheesy text animation but they were quite impressed and landed the job.
flash was the saviour of my universe!
- yes.... a couple of years ago you could make major coin with a bunch of cut-paste actionscript
vaxorcist
- yes.... a couple of years ago you could make major coin with a bunch of cut-paste actionscript
- whatsup0
oh man, i hope there will actually be some useful sites there, and not just a bunch of sites that show motion.
- ArmandoEstrada0
Major problem is that most clients today expect some sort of CMS so they can go in and update and edit their sites. There never really was a solid CMS system for Flash. I saw a few attempts here and there, but nothing like a wordpress, joomla or Drupal solution. I know you can incorporate this stuff into Flash in some fashion, but it never worked as advertised.
- mikotondria30
Flash's greatest strength was the ease with which one could intuitively animate, with the added bonus that you could make the animation interactive and so present the user with a previously unseen medium - interactive animation, which they loved.
Then they spent the next several revisions trying to implement all the functionality of a normal web-page, with notable exceptions like the ajax-like send and load, whilst barely adding significant improvements to the core animation/design. In the end, everything is not awkwardly programmed, but abstractly programmed, including animation, which is improved from Flash 4 days only significantly if one codes it.
Like a tree with 2 branches, the functionality of Flash grew too rapidly and eventually the creative flourish driven by designers was toppled by an army of snarky developers endlessly bitching about why a fricking text-box scroller class wasn't properly instantiated, and custom listeners tracing out variables in the bubbling phase. Working in Photoshop and having to cobble together some jQuery was much more appealing all of a sudden, plus as said above, being able to present a client with a CMS was a great plus.
I used to spend all day and a lot of the night in Flash, early on it was being inspired and exploring the medium. Towards the end it was wracking my brains and scouring forums looking for a solution to a problem related to doing the simplest of tasks. And finding out it was a known 'bug' and that I'd have to try another way or another idea entirely.
Plus the means to produce swf files seemed to fracture into a thousand different directions, probably technically for the good, but once the IDE became bloated and overly complex for initiates that was really the end of the golden days. And honestly it actually hurts me a little inside to write that - I loved that program. I loved cobbling together a crazy design in photoshop, importing it, using the timeline, adding some generative AS2, sound, interactivity, when it was all balanced a pitched to people with just my levels of creative inspiration and skill-set it really was a brave new world, and for the next generation of coders and designers, they won't really know what it was like to be on that trip, and that's a bit sad - working in Flash in the first few years of the 21st century totally blurred the lines between coding and design and I don't think we'll see such a fruition of new ideas at that rate again.
- whatsup0
I just realized this issue was dated in 2001. explains alot. those those are gone but missed. perhaps things will come around full swing again.
- eieio0
wo timeline... but in a good way
- showpony0
thinking more about this, i think that so much of what people are excited about today often has its roots in flash. in the early days, flash (and director) provided ways for designers to relatively easily prototype possibilities in the "new media" without needing a team of developers to make something "work"... many of those studies have been silently absorbed into our thinking about web today, with no credit given (especially by print designers who, ironically, seem to be running so many of the design blogs these days).
- yep, it was the catalyst for hundreds of design concepts.kingsteven