The Road to Animate

Younger readers may not fully appreciate how much the internet has changed over the years. When I started using the internet in the nineties it was done with a device called a modem which plugged into your phone line meaning that when you were connecting to the internet you were making a phone call to your internet service provider. The modem I originally had was a 28000 baud modem which means it was able to send and receive 28000 bits or 0.028 megabits which is roughly 3k per second under optimal conditions. This is really slow so video was not really something that you would have on a website. Even images were really slow where with large images you could actually see the image being loaded. This is why vector based animation systems actually made sense and why Future Splash was pretty impressive for its time. Instead of sending the bits that make up the image, vector systems would just send the points and edges that make up the shapes. For simple shapes, like those in early internet animations, this was significantly less information than the bitmap representation of the image so could be transmitted much faster.

Future Splash was competing with a technology that Macromedia was pushing called Shockwave which was acquired by Macromedia when they purchased MacroMind for their Director game making software. Macromedia acquired Future Wave, the company that was behind Future Splash, so they could add the vector animation tool to their shockwave platform. This is the reason why Flash binary files have the swf extension which stands for ShockWave Flash.

When Java arrived on the scene Java applets (note that Java and JavaScript are not the same thing) were still thought to be the future of interactive web pages. Browsers were being shipped already loaded with Java while Flash required a plug-in program be downloaded and installed into your browser. The Java craze was so strong that even Macromedia had an optional Java version of their Flash player. I was hired to see if it would be possible to have a Flash game where the animation was handled by the Java-based Flash player and game logic would be written in Java. This proved to be clumsier than expected and pure Java solutions were chosen for the project.

While I think Java could have taken control of the browser, this ultimately failed due to a conflict between Microsoft and then Java-owner Sun Microsystems. Sun wanted Java to be a standard that would work the same on all browsers while Microsoft wanted to be able to make Windows the operating system of the internet and added extensions to the internet explorer version of Java that made it work better on Windows due to the ability to access Microsoft APIs such as Direct X. A court battle ensued, Java on the browser stagnated, and alternatives for Java started being looked for.

This is roughly the time that ActionScript was added to Flash. While not the greatest scripting language, this made the product useful for games and other interactive web content and ultimately replaced Java as the go-to technology for interactive web sites.  I started using Flash and wrote the original Flash Game Development book that this book is based on and everything was good with the exception of the occasional exploit, too many sites having intro movies created in Flash, and many extremely annoying interactive ads which happened to be written in Flash though would have also existed in any other alternative had there been an alternative with a large enough market share.

Flash was still a very strong standard when Adobe bought out Macromedia. Unfortunately for Adobe, things were about to change thanks to a fruity company releasing a phone a couple of years later. While saying that iPhone not supporting Flash was the cause of its demise is not the full story, it was certainly a big factor. The idea of plug-in for browsers was starting to be looked on as a negative factor as plug-ins were increasingly the target that hackers used to attack browsers.

The ultimate nail, in my opinion, was the release of HTML5 and the Canvas API (which if I recall correctly was an API designed by Apple for their browser). This allowed for web developers to do everything that Flash could do right within the browser knowing that all users with a browser could run the program. Granted, the HTML5 apps were slower and larger than the equivalent Flash files, but they worked without any plug-ins.

Flash was not just used for creating web pages, but was still a popular tool for animation studios. With the death of Flash on the browser rapidly approaching Adobe decided to handle the death of Flash by renaming the tool Animate which reflects the target audience for the tool. To help support browser developers, Adobe did introduce the HTML5 stage which allows the creation of HTML5 projects that convert Flash vector objects and animations in to JavaScript using the Create.js library. The ActionScript code is not currently converted to JavaScript so any interactive code must be written in JavaScript using Create.js library calls.

So while Flash is dead, Animate is not and can be used as a tool for the creation of HTML5 animated content. For people who have used the Flash development tools, things have not changed that much and you will quickly find your way around the tool. For those not familiar with the tool, there are several built-in tutorials and a decent manual that can be downloaded.

Programming, the Coming of Language

(Continued from Programming, the Early Years)

The thought was that if the languages would be more human like so it would be easy for people to create software then there would be no need for programmers. The earliest programming languages were created to allow scientists and researchers the ability to write programs themselves which is why FORTRAN is considered to be the first high-level programming language. The idea here being that  The programs in these higher level languages would be run through a tool called a compiler which either converted the program into assembly language (which would then have to be ran through an assembler) or straight into machine language.

While higher level languages made it easier to create programs, learning how to program was still a chore. The fact that the programs were ran in batches so there was a long delay between writing code and seeing the results was the biggest culprit. Computers, thankfully, continued to grow in power to the point that there were a lot of waisted computer cycles. To better utilize the hardware, time-sharing systems and terminals started appearing. This lead to the obvious idea of having programming languages that were interactive in nature. By interpreting the code instead of compiling the code it was possible to write programs in real time.  The downside to interpreters were that they were significantly slower than compilers.

Another issue that was becoming bothersome was the fact that every machine had a different machine language. Sure, you could simply write programs in high level languages and compile it for the different computers that the program had to be ran on, but different compilers for the same language would compile the code differently so idiosyncrasies were common place. The term for moving code from one computer to another is porting. The fact that a term was created to describe this problem (which still persists today) should tell you that it was not a trivial problem. UCSD Pascal solved this problem by compiling code to a virtual p-machine language. The computer would then interpret this virtual p-code. Because p-code was essentially machine language, the computer could interpret this code much faster than an interpreted language could be ran. Still, it was slower than code compiled for a particular machine. When micro-computers started taking off, the speed difference became a big factor in commercial software sales.

While it seemed that compiled code won, computers continued to grow faster to the point where they were more than fast enough to accomplish most common tasks. At the same time, the internet  started taking off. Sites wanted to be more dynamic but had to be not only cross-platform but cross-browser compatible. Both interpreters (JavaScript) and virtual machines (Java) were used to accomplish this. To make the virtual machine fast enough, a new technique called Just-In-Time compiling was developed. The idea here is that the virtual machine code is compiled into native machine language as it is ran so code will run much faster.
The concept of a virtual machine running on the browser seemed to me to be the best solution. Sadly, for a variety of reasons Java never became the browser language of choice but instead ended up largely on the server. Flash is currently the virtual machine of choice for browser programming, but JavaScript is probably the most common choice for web development. The only thing holding JavaScript back is the lack of some of the Rich Internet Application features, but HTML 5 is pretty much solving those issues. It will be a few years before HTML 5 becomes the standard, but with Google, Apple, and Mozilla pushing for the standard it is possible to take advantage of a lot of HTML 5s features right now.

So we have gone from writing code in machine language to compiling the code into machine language to running the code in an interpreter. What is really interesting is that changes in hardware is what drove programming evolution. Computers are now so fast and have so much memory that programmers no longer need to concern themselves with writing efficient code. What matters now is that the code that is written is finished quickly. Sure, many programmers want to write efficient code but they only have to write efficient code in the increasingly rare case where the program runs too slow. What is worse is the fact that programming has moved further away from machine language that there are many programmers who don't really understand what the computer is actually doing. That, however, is a subject for another day.

The 40th birthday of video games?

May 15 th 1967 the first television-based video game was played between Ralph Baer and Bill Harrison. 1up.com decided to call this the 40 th birthday of the video game and wrote a multi-paged article on the topic. Of course anybody who has researched the history of video games know already that in February of 1962 SpaceWar was running on a PDP 11. For those of you who don't know, SpaceWar was the game that inspired Nolan Bushnell to form Atari, and Atari was the company that managed to get video games into popular culture. That being said, SpaceWars (and Tennis for Two which was released in 1958) didn't use Televisions for their display, but then again, neither did a lot of the arcade games I played as a kid so I am not sure why there is such a big deal being made by that minor point.

Ralph Baer had the idea of video games on the television back in 1951 when he was working on a television for Loral Electronics. Based on interviews I have seen with him, the idea came from the testing of the television prototypes where blocks were generated on the display. The company wasn't interested in the idea (because they were already behind schedule) so he put the idea away. Years later he remembered the idea and on September 1 st,1966 he filed a patent disclosure document for the idea.

My interest in computers and programming came as a result of seeing video games when I was a little kid, with Asteroids and Space Invaders being the first video games I ever saw. When I finally got a computer, I tried creating games. Back then there were magazines that had games that you could type in. I also found a couple of books that contained text based games and was one of the inspirations for my Ultimate Retro Project a decade or so later.