Hello Linuxquestions. I love you.

I make things. Weird generators, music, games, hypnotizing applications, anything really. Back in my windows days, prior over two years ago, I used to whip all sorts of crazy stuff out with nothing but fl studio, audacity, puredata, flash and that sort of stuff.

I took the linux plunge though after I realized what unholy future microdollarsignoft was heading towards...and I must say I'm doing pretty well. I got all my favourite closed-source software to work on wine, and thats just faboulus...but it still feels like cheating. I want to let go of fl and flash. Especially flash...but its just so goddamn perfect, or at least it was, back when you could make a living with SWF's.

I scoured the interwebs for software that would do what I want, but none of them are quite right. Especially interactivity wise. I've learned some wonderfull things like making games with puredata, pygame, allot of different game engines and libraries, but none of it fits the wonderful what-you-see-is-what-you-get vibe that made flash so hugely great. I find myself still opening flash up regularly just to sketch out some prototypes and they are marvelous. Recreating them in another language seems very arbitrary and hard for a slacker like me, but inventing new prototypes is slow and hard when working with sdk'less engines or having to switch between three or four pieces of software every 2 seconds for 2 hours to get something "just right".

Where is my open-source all-in software sdk? Where is my javascript/html5 flash-mx?
How do I combine kolourpaint with pencil, javascript and gedit? Am I barking up the wrong tree? Is there something obvious I am overlooking? Who do I pay to create something like that, and who wants to buy enough of my music to pay him?

Quick peeps, I am THIS close to making my computer dual-boot to windows...but I really don't want to...but adobe...epic battle...garh.


PS. Sorry for the poetic writing style, I feel odd.

Hi and welcome to LQ!

Why write your own prototypes? There's plenty of JavaScript libraries out there. HTML5+JS is about as good of an alternative to open standards flash as it gets. Back when I did a lot of development on the web I found Aptana Studio to be very good because it had things like autocompletion and a built-in web server so I could quickly preview my work.

How much have you really researched? I did a quick google search for "html5 games" and the second result for me was a site that tells you all about game development and engines for HTML5. There's a plethora of JS libraries and they're not hard to find if you simply search for them.

Edit:
Found a good write up on game development at mozilla.

Edit Edit:
WebStorm is a proprietary IDE for JS development but for many platforms including Linux. If you think you'd need support in your development they're probably the way to go if you find Aptana to be difficult (which I don't think it is but just giving you an alternative).

Edit Edit Edit:
Now a days I just use vim with python -m SimpleHTTPServer.