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So hi, I made a living doing Flash animation and development around 2000-2007. I don't do it any more, I draw comics now, but I still keep the Flash editor inst

So hi, I made a living doing Flash animation and development around 2000-2007. I don't do it any more, I draw comics now, but I still keep the Flash editor installed just in case I need to scratch the itch to make something move. The SWF format, and the plugin that plays it, is going away. The program that started life as FutureSplash Animator, and became Macromedia Flash, then Adobe Flash, is not going away. It got rebranded as Adobe Animate last year. Animators working on stuff for Youtube or TV probably haven't touched a .SWF in years. You export a .MOV and post that to Youtube. Or you drop it in a video editor along with the .MOVs of all your other scenes for this project. The Los Angeles TV animation industry still uses Flash for some projects; check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_television_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis... sometime, you'll probably recognize a few shows you or your friends love. If you're using it to make interactive content? You can export to HTML5 now. And to WebGL and WebAssembly. I haven't ever done that myself, I dunno how much hassle it is to convert an old Actionscript/.SWF project to those platforms. I would assume that the 'Animate' rebranding coincided with Adobe feeling that the HTML5 capabilities for interaction were on par with .SWF's; they've been working on that ever since Jobs refused to let the Flash plugin onto iThings. .SWF is dead, and good riddance. Its plugin was a CPU-hogging binary blob that needed regular updates. It was amazing back in 2000 when it was all we had; it's a lot less amazing now. The program that compiled a bunch of art and code into .SWF files will live on. The penultimate sentence of Adobe's press release? "...we’ll continue to provide best in class animation and video tools such as Animate CC...". The tool ain't going nowhere. The tool's just distancing itself from its now-much-loathed first export format. But I would bet money that Animate's file format - the .PSD to its Photoshop - is gonna continue to be called .FLA for the next ten years.

striking 9y ago
You can use this handy tool to convert your SWFs to transparent MOVs without importing to Adobe Animate/Flash: https://github.com/AaronShea/Silkscreen https://github.com/AaronShea/Silkscreen You won't get audio from it, but a lot of other stuff works.
prodikl 9y ago
yeah i think people forget (or just don't know) that flash became animate. Most of the "html5" animations we see are made in animate. so in a way, it's all still in the same family and toolset, just the delivery format has changed that said, i'm really curious as to what's going to happen to actionscript. Starling really ran with that and it's an otherwise really nice language (as3, that is). i'm glad they open sourced it and I hope it still gets developed. i also hope they keep developing and supporting AIR
- rhapsodic 9y ago
  >i also hope they keep developing and supporting AIR Flash support within AIR is going to continue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851400
- tuarua 9y ago
  AIR support remains and there are always features being added. AIR as a cross platform platform for Win/Mac/iOS/Android is still alive and has quarterly releases. Any missing functionality can be added via extensions written in native code. I've open sourced a few for desktop including a webview. It uses Chromium Embedded Framework (via C#) on Windows and WKWeview on OSX (via Swift) https://github.com/tuarua/WebViewANE/ https://github.com/tuarua/WebViewANE/ Others include FFmpeg, libtorrent,toast ports as well as porting of the C extension interface to C# and Swift.

striking 9y ago

You can use this handy tool to convert your SWFs to transparent MOVs without importing to Adobe Animate/Flash: https://github.com/AaronShea/Silkscreen https://github.com/AaronShea/Silkscreen You won't get audio from it, but a lot of other stuff works.

prodikl 9y ago

yeah i think people forget (or just don't know) that flash became animate. Most of the "html5" animations we see are made in animate. so in a way, it's all still in the same family and toolset, just the delivery format has changed that said, i'm really curious as to what's going to happen to actionscript. Starling really ran with that and it's an otherwise really nice language (as3, that is). i'm glad they open sourced it and I hope it still gets developed. i also hope they keep developing and supporting AIR

rhapsodic 9y ago
>i also hope they keep developing and supporting AIR Flash support within AIR is going to continue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851400
tuarua 9y ago
AIR support remains and there are always features being added. AIR as a cross platform platform for Win/Mac/iOS/Android is still alive and has quarterly releases. Any missing functionality can be added via extensions written in native code. I've open sourced a few for desktop including a webview. It uses Chromium Embedded Framework (via C#) on Windows and WKWeview on OSX (via Swift) https://github.com/tuarua/WebViewANE/ https://github.com/tuarua/WebViewANE/ Others include FFmpeg, libtorrent,toast ports as well as porting of the C extension interface to C# and Swift.