Mastodawn

As someone who was a true devotee of FutureWave SmartSketch (which became FutureSplash Animator, which became Macromedia Shockwave Flash, which became Adobe Flash, which became Adobe Animator) my sorrow is incalculable. Every day I long for software I had in the 90s which I can't find anything as good as today.

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:66c5dzsjoocyuwls45m4is7x/post/3mdylw2wsa22g

mcc Feb 4

Update

This is actually a very good outcome, until— and only until— the day comes Adobe Animate users have the need for Adobe to add support for one (1) additional import or export file format

Aftermath (@aftermath.site)

UPDATE: Following user backlash Adobe has changed plans, saying that while active development on Animate will cease, it will remain available for download. https://aftermath.site/adobe-animate-sunset-kill-off-ai-bullshit/

Bluesky Social

@mcc If you use open source software that isn't particularly popular, it might cease to exist as well. I used a "soundtracer" (a kind of synthesizer that you script in a language similar to that being used for POVray scenes) called "sapphire" over a decade ago, and then it suddenly vanished. I can't even find the source anymore, and the last time I downloaded the source a couple of years ago, I couldn't compile it because all the dependencies were outdated.

Roger BW 😷Feb 2

@LordCaramac @mcc Yeah, but at least then it would only take a sufficiently skilled group of people to make it work again, without _also_ needing to pay off greedy IP owners who'd rather see it rot.

@RogerBW @mcc The source might still exist somewhere.

@RogerBW @mcc Nope, all I can find are links to the original website that doesn't exist anymore. https://web.archive.org/web/20050901030734/http://www.pale.org/sapphire/

Sapphire

Lenni

🖖Feb 2

@LordCaramac @RogerBW @mcc The website has an (archived) link to the tarball with the source code: https://web.archive.org/web/20050901030734/http://www.pale.org/sapphire/sapphire_19.tgz (If the downloaded file ends in .txt for you as well just remove/change that extension to .tgz)

Wayback Machine

@Lenni @RogerBW @mcc Already ahead of you, looking at the content right now. I'm a horrible dilettante of a coder though, I don't think I can fix it.

stephen Feb 2

@LordCaramac
You might want to look into running the software on an old linux version in a VM.

Yes an old Linux is unsupported and probably full of security holes. Don't let the vm talk to the Internet and you should be fine.

@dmaonR I would need a Linux from ~2008 for that, I think.

stephen Feb 3

@LordCaramac The oldest liveCD I could find was Debian5 from 2009. there are 3 binaries in the tgz. all from 1998!. one is windows the other two are linux. I didn't try compiling. the binary src/sapphire maybe works? I don't know what I am looking at.

old debian: https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/

Lord Caramac the Clueless, KSC Feb 3

@dmaonR I might try using the .exe with Wine. I sometimes use windows binaries from around the turn of the millennium with Wine.

Gorgeous na Shock!Feb 2

@LordCaramac @Lenni @RogerBW @mcc I got the source to compile on my 64-bit Debian Trixie with gcc 14 with some minor tweaking: https://codeberg.org/indigoparadox/sapphire

It seems to run enough to get a REPL going, but I haven't played with it yet. There's some gnarly pointer/int math going on so who knows how it'll fare in 64-bit land? 😌

sapphire

The sapphire accoustic compiler: https://web.archive.org/web/20050901030734/http://www.pale.org/sapphire/

Codeberg.org

@indigoparadox @Lenni @RogerBW @mcc Thanks. I think the last time I wrote any code in C was some 15 years ago; the entire number of C lines I have written in my life is probably less than 3000, and I have forgotten most of what little I used to know about GCC, and that was ages ago.
I'm much more familiar with Pascal and Python, I suck at Java, and I could probably still do a lot of silly things in GW-BASIC because that's what came with my first MS-DOS PC. I had to learn some Haskell at uni, but I never used it again and forgot almost everything. I also had to learn C++ and forgot most about it, although its similarity to Java means that I probably remember more than I think, but I stink when it comes to C++.
I mostly write single purpose command line tools in Pascal or Python for my own purposes, and most of those get called by bash scripts.

Jiří Fiala Total Landscaping Feb 3

@LordCaramac @indigoparadox @Lenni @RogerBW @mcc well, does it work? Don't leave us hanging :)

Usagi Feb 2

@indigoparadox @mcc @LordCaramac @Lenni @RogerBW You can compile 32bit if you insist. Many distributions still support it, at least on x86.

Also the way to do the global variable is you put an extern declaration in the header, and non-extern declaration in one C file.

@bunny @mcc @indigoparadox @Lenni @RogerBW I'll give it a try later, but right now I'm too busy playing with my kitten Momo who had to visit the strange humans in the scary house full of strange animals and weird chemical smells who stuck her with needles earlier today. It definitely sounds nice to play with Sapphire again. It's just a completely different sort of sound design compared to my usual synths (mostly ancient digital synths from the 1980s and 1990s).

Gorgeous na Shock!Feb 2

@bunny @mcc @LordCaramac @Lenni @RogerBW On the first pass, I wanted to modify the original source as little as possible.

Pineking Thintree Feb 3

@indigoparadox @bunny @mcc @LordCaramac @Lenni @RogerBW
lexyy.c and sapphire in /src can be removed too.
Tested on linuxmint 22.3

Lord Caramac the Clueless, KSC Feb 5

It compiled into a working binary. Looks good so far. Thanks!

@RadND @indigoparadox @bunny @mcc @Lenni @RogerBW

pedro 🍉Feb 3

@LordCaramac @Lenni @RogerBW @mcc this looks a lot like csound.

@LordCaramac @RogerBW Although it's not the point of your post, would you like a boost trying to find the original?

@mcc @RogerBW I already found it on the Wayback Machine, thanks anyway.

Attila Kinali Feb 2

@RogerBW @LordCaramac @mcc It doesn't take a group. All it takes someone who goes on a "I can get this working again" frenzy for a weekend. Once it compiles and works again, updating and extending it, is easy.

Garrett Wollman Feb 2

@LordCaramac @mcc This. The depth of today's software stack, even in OSS, is enormous, and nearly everything is on a mandatory-update treadmill thanks to compiler and runtime developers no longer caring about backward compatibility. And you can't just not update because everything is exposed to network-borne threats (and other stuff you want/need to run requires newer dependencies).

I've gotten saltier about this in the past 20 years.

@wollman @mcc I still haven't even updated all of my own Python code from Python 2.x to Python 3.x yet. I'll probably do it all within a single week as soon as it becomes too much of a hassle to get Python 2 to work alongside 3.

BoredomFestival Feb 2

@mcc This made me remember all the awesome, free games on Newgrounds and other sites :-/

Hanneke Feb 2

@BoredomFestival @mcc the name of the project escapes me, but I believe there was a project a few years ago that has thousands? of newground games and a shell/wrapper around it to play them.

GamingWolf 🐺Feb 3

@h5e @BoredomFestival

Howdy, were you looking for Flashpoint Archive?

Hanneke Feb 3

@GamingWolf @BoredomFestival yes! Well I meant to point you towards it (in case you weren’t aware already) since you seemed nostalgic for it. Anyway, over 200k games lol 😂

@mcc amen.

What does "amen", or the Jewish contraction el melekh ne’eman, translated: “God, faithful King,”

Have to do with FLOSS software?

tsukaj Feb 2

@crankylinuxuser @dbat @mcc he's just agreeing with the post

Ah, I guess that makes sense?

dbat

Feb 3

@tsukaj @mcc @crankylinuxuser yeah, agreeing with post. Miss 90s software and Flash. Amen in this way might be a localism.

mcc Feb 3

@tsukaj @crankylinuxuser @dbat I am from the United States South and immediately understood what you meant

tsukaj Feb 6

@crankylinuxuser @dbat @mcc out of curiosity, where did you get that etymology from?

Probably 20 years ago, when I was studying various religious and occult systems. It came up when studying Kaballah.

It also came up before when I was a lay Catholic. The clergy does not like when the average people actually understand what all these things said and actions done actually do. So, I naturally studied them.

You'd be surprised how many of these common words and phrases do not mean what thru are commonly taken to mean.

https://www.sac7kt.org/post/amen-god-faithful-king

tsukaj Feb 10

@crankylinuxuser do you have a source on that? i looked but couldn't find any reliable source for it, most places i looked cited א־מ־נ as the common semitic root of the word

breaks it down well.

Deuteronomy 7:9

You do need an Etz Hayim to get the full understanding , since it is in Hebrew and a Hebrew contraction. A Torah and commentary online should also suffice.

AMEN - God, Faithful King

The acronym AMEN, which stands for "El Melech Ne'eman" ("God, Faithful King"), can be identified in the Book of Deuteronomy, specifically in Deuteronomy 7:9. The passage reads:"Know therefore that the Lord your God, He is God, the faithful God, who keeps covenant and lovingkindness with those who love Him and keep His commandments to a thousand generations."In Hebrew, the relevant part of the passage is:"יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ הוּא הָאֱלֹהִים הָאֵל הַנֶּאֱמָן"Breaking it down:• הָאֵל (HaEl) = The God•

SAC7-KT

bit101 Feb 2

@mcc I was also a true devotee, but my grief ran its course more than a decade ago.

bit101 Feb 2

@mcc I can still get extremely nostalgic about it though.

E. C. Bigribs Feb 2

@mcc Hilarious to recount the history of Flash while not mentioning that one awful company, the one that also owned Director and FreeHand and DreamWeaver and, I dunno, Swivel 3D or something.

@eedly HECK! I'm kinda sick today and off my game. Also I thought Macromedia was good.

E. C. Bigribs Feb 2

@mcc I came from the Director side of things, and Macromedia's decision to have two flagship animation apps with UIs and workflows that looked very similar but were largely incompatible (I'm forgetting details here; it's been decades) was super frustrating.

The place I worked composited animations in Director and exported them using Lingo scripts and proprietary tools, and recreating that workflow from scratch for Flash was kind of a nonstarter.

Usagi Feb 2

@mcc @eedly Back when Macromedia owned the Flash IP people actually wanted to use it but the player was crap, and they would not let people to make their own to have total control over the platform.

The result is it died.

Now you can write your own player but nobody cares anymore, we have WebGL.

Eryck Gu⸸⸸eЯaL Feb 8

@bunny @mcc @eedly

Yeah, I remember there was a GNU flash implementation but, it was generally only useful for older stuff. 🫤

Feoh Feb 2

@mcc Sorry to hear, but IMO not surprising.

We're caught between the devil of late stage enshittification and the deep blue sea that is all the money FLYING out of the personal computer market.

💀 𝓕airchild 💀Feb 2

@mcc Same. It was a revelation and a revolution. So much web content created (sure, not all of it good, but...) An it was, except for crashiness, a pleasure to use.

Scott Williams 🐧Feb 2

@mcc I still remember how excellent and affordable Cool Edit Pro was until Adobe bought it, rebranded it as Adobe Audition, and made the price instantly astronomical.

Maho Pacheco Feb 2

@mcc we should have a law/regulation that says that any discontinued/non-supported software MUST be made #opensource

Rafael Pérez 🌱Feb 3

@mcc I developed a web site very early in my career using Future Splash Animator. In some ways the technology was way ahead of its time.

Li ~ Crystal System Feb 3

@mcc yeah this, there isn't really anything that matches its functionality;

like fuck can you name any vectored video formats that can also have interactivity and a whole goddamn scripting language;

fuck forget that; can you name any software that would create and manipulate such a format?

it .. doesn't exist.

mcc Feb 3

@Li Based on long familiarity with Flash and having spent over a decade thinking about this exact problem, I believe that I could represent all features of Flash within either the SVG file format or a modest extension or SVG.

However, making the tooling to edit such a file format? Making that tooling to the quality level required by art professionals?

I'm gonna need many millions of dollars, a *good* recruiter, and at least two years. For the MVP.

mcc Feb 3

@Li also, if you build this on top of webtech as I propose in the previous post, it might turn out the timing is shit.

poleguy looking for lost tools Feb 2

@mcc "This author has chosen to make their posts visible only to people who are signed in."

@poleguy @mcc https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile%2Fdid%3Aplc%3A6vk7e6satzt2zkcwwszhklqa%2Fpost%2F3mdvidtgk3s2k&viewtype=tree

val Feb 2

A BlueSky thread by Keith Stack on Skyview

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuhh...

crab Feb 2

@mcc wait didn't Keith Stack publish an animation made with this... Yesterday?

This fucking sucks

@operand yes he did