The Adobe House Built On Sand

20+ years an industry standard. 10 free stock images.

Adobe's Flash is being forcibly retired at the end of the year due to its shortcomings on the security front. I don't pretend to understand what that means. All it makes me think of is when I was in a training class for a call center job. Someone somewhere had once upon a time embedded Flash-based versions of Sonic the Hedgehog and Tetris into a blank Excel document so as to slip it past our supervisors and the IT department, ensuring that each training class would have access to these little distractions, kind of like a chain letter. 

Many people are very saddened by this for all the various Flash-based websites and small games that are going to be rendered more or less totally pumpkin when the clock strikes midnight. There have been some efforts to preserve these games, including the creation of a specially made platform that emulates the old school player. 

A wise one once said that writing a great novel is a very difficult thing to do because there have been so many books over so many millennia by so many people. However, once you achieve that status of having written a great novel, you're more or less set for life and beyond because your book will still be available in some way, shape, or form. The biggest innovation in publishing in the last hundred years has been the e-book, which only furthers the preservation principle past the printed page. Video games have the exact opposite problem because even if making a great game was a little easier, the longevity is non-existent because the hardware used to play the games changes so rapidly that unless you actively update and rebuild your game for each new platform, you're going to be left in the dust. Furthering the preservation principle in the other direction is the fact that some games are made with specific hardware in mind and it may simply be impossible to port the game to a newer system. 

This is what always bothers me when someone refers to a piece of software as an industry standard. Flash was one such industry standard, especially in animation. To be fair, Adobe reworked Flash into a separate piece of software called Animate, so it's still technically as much an industry standard as it is proprietary software owned lock, stock, and barrel by Adobe. I remember once looking around for some kind of lower-end, budget-friendly competitor once upon a time and every option coming up short. The student version of Flash started at around 1250USD, and there was simply no way I could justify that kind of price, even as a film major with an interest in animation. Instead, I bought a copy of Poser 4 for about 100, used it for 2-ish years then practically forgot I had it for the next 10 years before finding the discs in a binder... where they still are to this day.

At least with Photoshop, Adobe offered a pared-down version called Elements that would sometimes come bundled with a drawing tablet or a photo scanner. They never offered any such option for Flash. There were some third party options that could export an animation to Flash, but these were very hit-or-miss, and most simply didn't run on my computer by way of the partially-eaten piece of fruit on the casing. When Adobe rolled out the Creative Cloud suite, their "software as a service" model with monthly subscription fees in lieu of an upfront cost, I think I felt about every emotion possible between mildly enraged and extremely annoyed in one single sentence, "WHERE THE FUCK WAS THIS VERY WELCOME CONVENIENCE IN 2002!?" 

For the life of me, I don't remember if my department offered any sort of Flash animation programs (thereby bypassing any need to purchase my own copy). If there were, they were for computer science and web design majors. I haven't checked back on it now, but during my enrollment, the university was very oddly-structured when it came to film studies, hence my degree being an Arts & Sciences degree rather than a Fine Arts degree as one would expect. The point is I probably could have changed majors or done some serious lobbying to the powers that be to somehow bridge the gap, but that would have been one more rock-and-hard-place situation I simply didn't want hard enough or whatever other unhelpful bullshit life coach rhetoric would get espoused. The overlaps in their respective curriculums were very narrow, so I would have had to practically start over halfway through my degree, and if any attempts to remedy that situation fell through, I'd be left with nothing to show for it. 

I mentioned Flash being "survived" in a way by Animate. The only thing that animators are going to lose in the shutdown is the player, which most of them likely hadn't used in years thanks to YouTube. Apart from the games produced in Flash, another area where it held the distinguished rank of "industry standard" was in web design. In addition to designing small applications that could run inside a web browser (such as a game), it was possible to design an entire site in Flash. This was a common practice for Dreamcast games. At least, that was the majority of my exposure to it. This was back when the majority of websites had very straightforward (by today's standards) design because of the limitations of HTML. Flash allowed these sites to be, well, flashier, like those animated DVD menus that get an "ooh" or "ah" the first time you see them before getting immediately obnoxious. As the capabilities of HTML expanded and languages such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) and Javascript also grew up into big strong web development environments, the Flash sites became old hat. 

Hopefully, the transition from Flash to HTML5 or CSS or whatever was fairly seamless for those who had made that investment in Flash all those years ago, that it gave them some kind of gentle slope instead of a wall. "I went to school for X, but I learned Y on my own from the comfort of my career." is how I imagine they'd sum up the change in scenery. Obviously, it's futile to assume anything will be stable, and Flash did enjoy a long, long period of relevance for a piece of software. Nowhere is it written that a program you use at university is going to remain an "industry standard" for years and years after you graduate. The assumption truly seems to be that learning Flash would get you to a point from where you could comfortably expand your skills into something that will keep your head above water when that ship inevitably sinks.

So, what does that make those companies still referring to X-2000 as an industry standard and required knowledge for their open position in a cutting-edge field? 

Better be a lot of stock images somewhere in there. 

A Sketchy Arc

Damn it, Sketchup, why do I have to fight with you so much? I keep trying to give you the benefit of the doubt that you've simply got a learning curve and how you work as a 3D modeling program isn't like those other 3D modeling programs. I write these long, angry diatribes about how making a sphere is like summoning a demon while on the moon and with a bucket over my head, yet I wait. 

Now, today, after revisiting the browser-based version, I swear you're pulling the wool over my eyes. 

I was literally trying to recreate what I saw in this video in another tab and at around the 4:10 mark, I see a sleight of hand. This is the comment I left verbatim and a screenshot of exactly what I was seeing when I tried to follow along.

Okay, I hate to be "this guy" but I feel like we're either missing a step or calling a tool by the wrong name. I'm literally following this to the letter in another tab right now and my arc tool isn't working like this... at all. I didn't even see you click on the arc tool, it was just selected after you made the line.
I make the vertical line, put the circle on top, draw another line from the center of the base to the edge... and then the arc tool acts nothing like what I'm seeing on screen. I click on the arc tool and I get a compass overlay that keeps trying to draw an arc that's convex to the vertical line. After some fiddling to try and at least get the arc to be concave, it doesn't go from the edge of the base to the circle up top. It's only as tall as it is wide and trying to tweak it gets me an error message about too many segments.
I have no clue what I'm doing wrong and I feel like this happens every time I try to do anything in Sketchup.

It may be a little hard to see, but that little green circle near the edge of the base is what I somehow have to place somewhere to make an arc between the edge of the base and the circle atop the line. It's also worth repeating that we saw this tutorial first select the arc tool, then change their minds and select the line tool, draw a line from the center of the base to the edge, and next thing we know we're drawing an arc between those two points. 

Let's be clear: you have to select the tools on the left hand side of the screen. His mouse cursor never ventures close to that and suddenly we go from a line tool to an arc tool. I can't find any keyboard shortcuts that would allow this, and even if I did, the arc tool doesn't work as it's being shown. 

This is why I hate learning any kind of software. There's always something in the tutorial (which I've sometimes PAID for the "opportunity" to sit through) that is not accurate, it's fairly important, and whoever I learn it from gets so embarrassingly tripped up it's like watching someone try to recite the alphabet backwards and start over every time they mess up. Normally, when I've written these, I leave them in the drafts folder until I calm down a little, I read a few more tutorials, wind up feeling stupid because I missed something obvious, and then the post never goes live due to its newfound inaccuracy. Given I've also left a comment on the video, I should probably wait until I get an answer to that before I go pressing the publish button. However, I've wound back this video at least five times and whatever the instructor is doing, it's not working when I try to do exactly as he says. 

Please, whatever I'm doing wrong, tell me. 

I'm not trying to shame anyone. I just want the damn thing to work as advertised. 

UPDATE: Okay, so about an hour after posting this, when I was still too frustrated to sit back down and give it another go, I reasoned that maybe it was the 2-point arc tool being used. This morning it turns out I'm right. So, that half of the mystery is solved, but it doesn't explain how he selected the arc tool, to say nothing of simply not specifying which of the 4 distinct arc tools he was referring to. I mean, that's kind of important. How many shapes are there?

Also, the top of the pawn is hollow now, and that's an improvement over the first time I tried using the "Follow Me" tool in order to make the upper portion.

UPDATE II: It's the mid-afternoon, and Sketchup responded to my YouTube comment, but only about halfway. 

Het Matt! InSketchUp Free, the nested tools show the last tool you clicked on. In this video, Aaron is showing the default tools (the ones that are available by default when you first start Sketchup Free). In the case of the Arc tool, 3 point Arc is the default, but if you clicked on 2-point Arc previously, that will be the tool that activates when you click on the Arc icon. Your best bet is to start a totally new session of Sketchup Free and try again.

Like I said before about the 2-point arc, he selected that particular arc tool, which means that if he ever goes back to it, that's the one that's selected. Fine, except that's not my problem. Not specifying which arc tool is annoying enough, but he seems to select it without using his cursor at all. There's a keyboard shortcut for the Arc tools, which is "A" conveniently enough. What's not convenient is that he doesn't mention this in the video and I don't even think it's mentioned in another video dedicated to explaining all the different arc tools. Exactly how "Step 1" is this chess piece tutorial? Admittedly, that's on me. I'm hardly a stranger to Sketchup, and I haven't touched the software in a while, so forgetting a shortcut or two isn't Trimble's fault. Known issues, though.... 

A quick check on the forums also revealed that if your model is too small, Sketchup will not draw certain faces. In my case, because my pawn is small, it puts a hole in the top. Here's where this software starts to fail at justifying its 800USD full version. If I take my model, before I use the "follow me" command to make a sphere and a pillar, and scale it up, it not only makes the sphere whole, but if I then scale it back down to where it couldn't draw the full sphere, there's still no hole. 

I'm not changing the number of polygons when I scale it, so why does the overall size matter? 

And Viewers Like You

Okay, I don't want to give this guy much grief, hence cutting off his name. I see this often enough he could represent a number of people we may know in our lives. It's a sign of a far bigger problem in our culture.

Setting aside the bullshit that is charging people 10USD to view files made on a CAD program that can costs hundreds (Want to see the mock-up of your commission? 10 bucks, please!), we have to bear in mind that there's no trial version of this app, and the word VIEWER is in the name, to say nothing of the full description.

That means this guy paid a full ten US dollars to use an app, only to give it a one-star review because it won't do what it never claimed to do in the first place.