[HN Gopher] Ruffle: 2023 in Review
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Ruffle: 2023 in Review
Author : hexmiles
Score : 60 points
Date : 2024-01-14 16:44 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ruffle.rs)
(TXT) w3m dump (ruffle.rs)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Great work, getting Flash back into the browser.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Incredible achievements. First time I used Open Collective:
| https://opencollective.com/ruffle
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| Honestly, the progress looks very impressive.
|
| We still need something as intuitive as Flash for developing
| interactive content for the web.
|
| I was barely 11 or 12, and it was amazing how quickly i went from
| drawing shapes to animating them to making them interactive with
| simple logic back in that summer.
|
| Fast forward to now, not sure what we have, that comes close to
| that level of ease of use. Maybe some game engine that exports to
| html canvas/webgl?
|
| I know that it's not the web frameworks and the fragile wsiwyg
| editors that target them.
| ITB wrote:
| We have partitioned the developer experience too far. We need a
| full stack stack.
| scq wrote:
| The Flash authoring tool still exists, it was just renamed to
| Adobe Animate. It supports Canvas and WebGL.
| grishka wrote:
| The SWF format itself was also nice though. It's just one
| file that you can easily host or share anywhere. One use case
| that was really cool was how VKontakte (the Russian Facebook)
| had Flash apps. You didn't need a server to build an app like
| you do now, you just uploaded the SWF in the app settings and
| that was it.
| MrJohz wrote:
| I think the loss of these tools has less to do with the death
| of flash, and more to do with the decline of the genre of
| "internet ugly" cartoons and free games as a whole. We have
| technology in the browser that is just as powerful and just as
| portable (case in point canvas), but we rarely see it being
| used in the same way to build the same variety of browser games
| and experiments.
|
| I know a lot of people talk about the tooling not being there,
| but I'm not sure that's the case. Web development is a very
| open field, there is a ton of documentation, and a lot of easy
| ways to get started. Just open developer tools in your browser
| and you can write Javascript - things were never the easy with
| flash. There's also plenty of free tools for building things
| with, from game libraries to animation editors, to IDEs.
|
| I think the bigger issue is that the audience isn't there in
| the same way. Partly that's culturally - part of the glory of
| that era of internet was proper reveling in crappy animation,
| gross-out humour, and absurdism. But that's no longer part of
| the cultural zeitgeist in the same way. As a result, the
| cultural force behind a lot of the early examples of the medium
| has died out.
|
| But also, and I think more importantly, the platforms have
| evolved. Animation still exists, but it looks different and
| tends to be hosted on YouTube or TikTok, because that's where
| people are. Games still exist, but now they're usually mobile
| games, because it turns out people like playing these games on
| the loo, and mobile browsers suck. And both of these platforms
| have their own advantages for creators: they both make
| monetisation easier, and they make it harder for other people
| to steal your work - both things that flash creators spent a
| lot of time worrying about.
|
| Even as flash was dying, if it was culturally necessary to
| maintain, people would have done so. We had the tools and we
| had the technology. In fact, people did - I remember people
| pushing "HTML5 games" for a while, but they were never any good
| because no one had been making good news games for a couple of
| years at that point. In the end, flash died for much the same
| reason that non-threaded forums and IRC died - the cultural
| forces that used them either died themselves, or switched to
| other systems.
| bsaul wrote:
| I don't think there's an equivalent to flash even today. The
| design tools and the model behind is still probably the best way
| to create moderately interactive content.
| ravetcofx wrote:
| From ease of development standpoint? Because featureset it
| seems like JavaScript and or WASM has absolutely filled that
| neiche. There were web apps and games that were never before
| feasible with flash.
| bsaul wrote:
| Yes, the frame by frame approach and focus on vector
| graphical animations made people have a lot of fun instantly
| ( together with the great authoring tools).
|
| I'm currently thinking about a project that requires "regular
| people" be able to create interactive content for the web,
| and honestly i don't see any alternative.
|
| Where it started to go bad is when people tried designing
| full data-oriented websites with flash and air, but i believe
| it remains great for its core purpose.
| mjevans wrote:
| Is there a good way of collecting information on currently
| missing Language / API calls in pages or files that have Flash
| elements not presently supported by Ruffle?
|
| It might make it more useful to know what makes one off well
| loved flash items not currently work, or which elements are
| commonly used but missing support.
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