Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

It's good that we have the runtime to run old Flash games. What we lost is an extremely easy environment for authoring/creating them. Nothing has come even close since Flash. Not just game, but any kind of interactions and animations on the web.




Where did the tools go?

Can a person not run Flash authoring tools with an era-appropriate operating system in a VM or something?


That's the only way I guess. What I meant, with the death of Flash, nothing appeared to offer the same tools for any other web technology

I think perhaps what was lost is mostly this: Macromedia. They had a knack for making content creation simple. Flash was just one of the results of this: It let people create seemingly-performant, potentially-interactive content that ran almost universally on the end-user computers of the time -- and do it with relative ease because the creation tools existed and were approachable.

Macromedia also provided direction, focus, and marketing; more of the things that allowed Flash to reach saturation.

Someone could certainly come up with an open JS stack that accomplishes some of the same things in a browser on a modern pocket supercomputer. And countless people certainly have.

But without forces like marketing to drive cohesion, simplicity, and adoption then none of them can reach similar saturation.


Having to run it in a VM already makes it less approachable



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: