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Much like Unity today, one of the drivers of Flash popularity was that you could hack something together pretty quickly in a single interface. Throw a bunch of

Much like Unity today, one of the drivers of Flash popularity was that you could hack something together pretty quickly in a single interface. Throw a bunch of elements onto the "stage", add some scripting, and you're done. In reality, though, serious applications or games seldom used the Flash IDE other than for designing/managing assets and packaging them (and sometimes not even for that). It was pretty bad in many ways for serious work. I used to create fully animated Flash websites and my work was 100% using FDT (an Eclipse plugin) and the external compiler (Flex SDK). It was way more sustainable. Stripping the Flash IDE itself (or whatever it's called today) down to the animation essentials and allowing it to export in a number of formats (SVG, GIF, etc) would be the best thing for the app. Not sure it's the direction they're going, however.

MattRix 9y ago
Animate CC (the new name for the Flash IDE) can do what you're talking about these days(exporting multiple formats, creating animation texture atlases, etc).
Joeri 9y ago
I wrote a CAD viewer app on flash 7.2 / 8 and definitely avoided the flash IDE as much as possible since it wasn't a particularly good IDE. I had just two frames on the stage, one for a loading message, one for the app ui container, with all behavior and ui creation in actionscript files, which I edited with an external editor. I moved up to the flex sdk eventually, completely abandoning the flash ide and not even using the flex ui framework (since it was too bloated). In the end though, the entire CAD viewer (essentially an SVG subset parsing and rendering engine with some ui decorations) was a 91 kb .swf, including the assets (like custom mouse pointers). That was the mixed blessing of flash: amazing abilities locked into a compromised platform.
- omg_ketchup 9y ago
  Flex was a little bloated, sure, but the Spark components were nice.

MattRix 9y ago

Animate CC (the new name for the Flash IDE) can do what you're talking about these days(exporting multiple formats, creating animation texture atlases, etc).

Joeri 9y ago

I wrote a CAD viewer app on flash 7.2 / 8 and definitely avoided the flash IDE as much as possible since it wasn't a particularly good IDE. I had just two frames on the stage, one for a loading message, one for the app ui container, with all behavior and ui creation in actionscript files, which I edited with an external editor. I moved up to the flex sdk eventually, completely abandoning the flash ide and not even using the flex ui framework (since it was too bloated). In the end though, the entire CAD viewer (essentially an SVG subset parsing and rendering engine with some ui decorations) was a 91 kb .swf, including the assets (like custom mouse pointers). That was the mixed blessing of flash: amazing abilities locked into a compromised platform.

omg_ketchup 9y ago
Flex was a little bloated, sure, but the Spark components were nice.