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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

The ebb and flow of various conventions for utilitarian or practical sites bears little connection with the amount of creativity present on the web.

"Shall I make a beautiful illustrative web-based experience or shall I make a site using Bootstrap?" said nobody ever.

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It's not about what any individual person may say, but about what gets produced in the end. Pure HTML and JS tools like Bootstrap make it easy to crank out basic web templates for developers, while tools like Flash made it easier for designers to make beautiful toys.

Well. It sounds to me now that you're making a slightly different point - and an altogether better one.

I actually made a similar argument yesterday to someone - whatever we feel about Flash as medium for normal web content or as a browser plugin, that shouldn't taint it's reputation as a content creation tool.

This is a really good observation. Flash allowed a designer to work in their tool and export that content directly to the web. Back in the day you'd buy a cheap FTP-enabled web hosting account, and upload your exported index.html and content.swf as-is and that would be it.

As a designer these days I don't think there's anything like that kind of workflow available any more.

You say that, but Flash was basically a drawing program with a timeline - this makes it much easier to doodle all sorts of things compared to building a site with Javascript and HTML.

Not entirely true. The Flash Runtime was ES4. Few who made applications after 2006 used Flash Pro. It was an Eclipse based editor for the most part (Flash Builder).

However I get the point, but I feel it is important to stress this difference that you bring up.

My 18 year old clueless self seen turtleshell.com randomly, thought it was amazing, looked up flash, did stuff in Flash, 10 years later OOP. 10 years after that, software engineering.

My 18 year old clueless self today would want to be like "somethingcool.com" but I would have to troll through about 12 months of tutorials to see something on the screen.

I'd work in a factory.

Today you'd create something in Unreal Engine or Unity and upload that to a server. Or export it as a mobile phone app.

You can't compare Flash and Unity (let alone Unreal) in terms of approachability. I pretty much learned Flash the day before starting a job once. Try that with Unity.

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