It’s been a great 10 years! I’ve been tinkering with Flash since FutureSplash, annd haven’t regretted a moment (well, I maybe regret the week I spent learning screens and forms in mx2004).
All the tenth anniversary activity has been awesome. I’ve really enjoyed looking back at old sites that really inspired me. The two that influenced me the most by far were nrg.be, which brought home to me just how cool Flash could be, and yugop.com, which woke me up to the full potential of AS for building experimental and reactive systems.
Ahh… those were the days. So much excitement, so many ideas still untapped! Flash is still awesome, but it doesn’t have quite the same pioneering aura that it had in the v4-5 days (though in its defense, you can actually make money with it now, which is a bit of a bonus).
Anyway, enough sounding like a COBOL geezer rocking on my porch. I’ve been having a great time with events surrounding the tenth anniversary. I was in San Francisco for the official party, prior to which I was dragged out for drinks to the Mars Bar by the Flash team. Maybe not a great idea, because I was feeling pretty inebriated, and looking a little worse for the wear when I was interviewed by Lynda.com, and then Zoom In later in the evening. There’s nothing like getting interviewed next to Adobe’s Chief Software Architect (Kevin Lynch) while you’re half hosed.
The party was great, with lots of reminiscing with old (and new) Flash friends. The Flashtinis were pretty gruesome, but those things always are (never trust a drink that gets poured through a corporate logo made of ice)!
I gave a more coherent interview about the history and future of Flash for an Adobe devnet article – there’s some interesting comments by other developers there, worth checking out. I also had a blast organizing and MCing (am I the only one that thinks “MovieClipping” when I see MCing?) the Edmonton Flash User Group’s tenth anniversary party.
If you haven’t already, I’d strongly recommend checking out the FWA 10 years of Flash site, to see the most influential Flash sites of the past 10 years. You should also check out the 10th anniversary minisite that Adobe put up.
Happy 10th Flash! Keep on making the web a cooler place to work and play!!
Yep, those flashtinis were terrible. But the glowing ice-sculpture sure did look cool 🙂
I would have said hi, but never bumped into you. There sure were a lot of people there.
Not sure the pioneering days have ended. I believe the best is yet to come.
Kristin,
I saw you once, and headed over to talk, but you disappeared. Darn vertically challenged folk. 🙂
Carlos,
I agree, the pioneering days have definitely not ended, and there’s tons of experimentation going on. There just isn’t the same level of industry wide excitement that there was a few years ago, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing overall. It means Flash is starting to grow up. There’s still tons of room for cutting edge, exciting experimentation, but it’s tempered with real, formal, corporate projects.
Whoo hoo happy 10 years Flash. I remember it was the eye4u site that got me hooked and yes Yugo Nakamura’s yugop site just blew me away.
I started playing around with Flash version 3.0… I think I was in grade 9 at the time.
hehe
I remember the orginal ego media website. that was the one that got me into flash.
Website is so easy to use – I am impressed with it. Thank you for sharing.