Saved by the Bell
by Jason in GeneralWith Creative Suite 4 and Flash 10 just over the horizon it seems a good time to reflect on where we’ve come from. I’m going to share my story of how I fell in love with Flash and what I was watching at the time. Everyone is welcome to share their personal story by posting a comment. Here goes.
Sometimes you just know. Like, when you meet the girl of your dreams something hits you and says this is the one! That’s how it was for me anyway. Way back when Zach Morris (Marc Paul Gosselaar) was pleading with Mr. Belding to put an oil derrick on school grounds (bonus points to anyone who remembers that episode) I started developing social communities. I did the front-end with Java Applets and I even went through the trouble of creating a native XML database to store friends, save conversations, and keep track of election results. The community functioned but it wasn’t extend-able and worst of all, it was dreadfully slow. This prompted dreams of greener pastures with fast, stable, graphics-rich environments.
Then one day, around the time Actionscript 2 was born, everything changed. I knew right away Flash was the one for me. Before I knew it I was using Flash for everything from websites to advertisements. I even created what would be referred to now-a-day as widgets. I fell in love with simplicity of AS2 and the freedom I had to create transitions easily, but most importantly I had a solid framework that screamed fast! There had been quite a lot of work put into making Actionscript a real development language and it showed. It wasn’t perfect, but it was light-years better than anything else out there.
Now, things are different. Marc Paul Gosselaar is pleading murder cases in Raising the Bar (Mondays on TNT), and CS4 is upon us. Now it’s your turn, what made you fall in love with Flash? For some it could of been the blank canvas and worlds of endless possibilities. Maybe it the way flash notified you when the stage resized? Or perhaps it was seamless video that made your neurons tingle? Lets hear it!
Andrei Potorac (bobocel)
September 17th, 2008
Love at first sight here too!
I was enjoying too much a website called http://www.mjau-mjau.com - it was revolutionary, even 5 yrs ago (and that is a lot considering the speed things change on the internet nowadays). They had a navigation menu based on proximity algorithms, and an animated cat that was running around the entire website, and bits of videos here and there. I was blown away!
I was visiting that website only for the nice effects it had. That’s when I realized there is a new thing on the internet called Flash. The rest is history.
Nick
September 17th, 2008
I know the exact feeling you speak of. Sir Eric Jordan and the 2Advanced website did it for me. I think it was v2 of his site… the one with the clouds, and freeway tunnels and stuff. Blew my friggin mind.
Garro
September 18th, 2008
i was lmao when i saw you remember the oil rigg on the school grounds episode…. sadly,i saw that episode aswell, lol…. has it been that long? damn!
i fell in love with flash when i saw movement, simple as that
Jurgen
September 18th, 2008
Haha I do remember that episode. It was great. The whole show was, actually.
Thanks for sharing your story
Adam_B4_GOD
September 18th, 2008
I used to be interested in animation. At the time I heard of flash I was building with javascript and html with the occasional CSS. When I found out about FRAM by FRAME ANIMATION I was set on discovering the potentials of flash.
Ajay Chhaya
September 18th, 2008
As many other Flash designer/Developer, the day I sow “yugop.com” I fell in love with Flash. As it showed what flash is capable of even with those limited actionscript options in the days of Flash 4/5.
polyGeek
September 18th, 2008
I started using Flash back around 1999 because browsers were ruining all the cool Javascript effects I was creating. I’d spend most of my time doing crossbrowser coding and not exploring new ideas. Flash provided a consistent experience across browsers and Flash versions. Since then I’ve written almost zero Javascript and never looked back.
Freddy
September 18th, 2008
you newbie!
I fell in love with Flash when I built a game (Flash 4) in just one week instead of a month (TRS80’s basic… I know, too old).
But I started with Flash 3, back in 1998 doing a website for my music band, the second website I made got me my first well paid day job in the field, also the second with twice the pay!, and as you, I did way ahead of time a lot of common stuff nowadays, widgets, video layers, ria’s… you name it, so sad to see how big portals, websites and sometimes bosses take ages to embrace new things.
I wouldn’t change anything (besides AS getting more and more complicated for real life tasks, not the original creators purpose), as Flash gave me the opportunity to work in a lot of interesting projects and still does, even got me some clients from other parts of the world.
my two pesos
VF
September 18th, 2008
I was started using Flash 5.0 in the year 2001. When the MX version released with onEnterFrame, I think I got what I needed to stick with Flash.
LGLab
September 19th, 2008
I remember wanting the same haircut as Zach lol….I fell in love with flash when I first made a circle go around a square with my first ever motion tween, I think I still have it somewhere….
max
September 19th, 2008
i fell in love with Flash the second i visited thefwa and realized that flash was the answer to turning websites into user experiences.
Morg
September 21st, 2008
Drag and drop did it for me. Well, not so much drag and drop, but _droptarget. Also started in Flash 4 way back. I just could not believe that with so little effort I could make really cool things happen.
I recall one of my first big projects - I wrote code in excess of 1000 lines of code and was super impressed with myself. Flash 5 took forever to open the FLA! haha. I can probably do that in 100 lines today… :$
Benjamin
September 21st, 2008
Saved by the Bell was the show to watch back in the day. I still remember Zach carrying that huge cellular phone in his pants. I used to want one of those things. And a car too, just so I could have a cell phone in it.
Phase
September 22nd, 2008
I fell in love with Flash back around 98/99, I will never forget seeing NRG.be back then, it was the most advanced thing and it blew my mind that things like that could be done, it’s funny because now their site is just a SlideShow Pro template.
But the original site inspired me to be a Flash man -
PS I could probably kill anyone in Saved By The Bell trivia -