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I used to work on an eLearning platform that used Flash. We had a team of animators creating content and working with professional voice talent. The content was

I used to work on an eLearning platform that used Flash. We had a team of animators creating content and working with professional voice talent. The content was rich and engaging. Asia especially loves the animated content. Then the iPad came out and all of our retail partners announced that they were adopting it. We had to switch to boring text and images nearly overnight. We tried adding some videos, but they are bandwidth hogs compared with Flash and didn’t do well in Asia where the bandwidth speeds were slower. Plus it turns out that it is much harder to create quality video content than animated content. Prior to that job, I worked with a different company also creating eLearning content in Flash. We worked for a major printer manufacturer and created a series of flash movies that had a 3D printer that could be rotated around. The tech could choose a task they wanted to do with the printer and it would walk them step by step through the process, showing on the 3D printer this screw being removed or that part being swung out of the way. The tech could zoom in and rotate the printer in any direction. Since it was all vector graphics they could zoom in and out all they wanted. It allowed them to completely disassemble the printer down to the smallest detail. Two guys could knock out one of these flash printer movies in a few days. I’m quite surprised that nobody has been able to replace flash vector animations and interactivity on the web. We were able to do things with Flash 20 years ago that was far in advance of anything you see today. I would think that someone could create a flash replacement that could work in canvas, but if anyone has managed to do it, I haven’t seen it. We seem to have replaced low-bandwidth interactive vector animations with high-bandwidth static videos. The web is the poorer for it. If content is king, someone should really work on creating a modern version of flash.

nicetryguy 6y ago
The advantage of Flash was that is was a plugin that ran uniformly across browsers, and integrated directly into whatever hardware it ran on. The trouble with Canvas or even SVG is that you never quite know what you're going to get, and even today, they don't quite have the horsepower of what Flash was able to accomplish with vector graphics 15 years ago. There are many things that i do not miss about Flash, and i do think it had to go due to becoming a security hole infested bloated mess and running terribly on smartphones; but boy do i miss that development GUI... and i loved Actionscript 2 and even 3, you know, when they worked...
- irrational 6y ago
  Yes, we came for the cross-platform nature of Flash (browsers were even worse at being standards compliant back then so something like Java/jQuery/Flash was essential), but we stayed for the low-bandwidth high-quality vector animations. It's too bad they didn't just stick to the core features and had to continually add features that introduced security holes. I had high hopes that between SVG and Canvas that someone would create a flash replacement, but it hasn't happened yet.
  - nicetryguy 6y ago
    Agreed. Adobe severely mismanaged Macromedia's baby. They kept adding features at a frantic pace while breaking core functionality. I remember AS3 being so broken by the early 2010s i wasn't even sure anymore if my code was wrong or Flash was just broken... It is shocking in retrospect a technology with all but 100% market share went to zero in just a few years with no suitable replacement in many respects. A WASM / Node / Canvas combination with a development GUI similar to Flash that all but bypasses HTML and CSS would be amazing; and if done correctly, possibly revolutionary. It is my dream project for some future time....

nicetryguy 6y ago

The advantage of Flash was that is was a plugin that ran uniformly across browsers, and integrated directly into whatever hardware it ran on. The trouble with Canvas or even SVG is that you never quite know what you're going to get, and even today, they don't quite have the horsepower of what Flash was able to accomplish with vector graphics 15 years ago. There are many things that i do not miss about Flash, and i do think it had to go due to becoming a security hole infested bloated mess and running terribly on smartphones; but boy do i miss that development GUI... and i loved Actionscript 2 and even 3, you know, when they worked...

irrational 6y ago
Yes, we came for the cross-platform nature of Flash (browsers were even worse at being standards compliant back then so something like Java/jQuery/Flash was essential), but we stayed for the low-bandwidth high-quality vector animations. It's too bad they didn't just stick to the core features and had to continually add features that introduced security holes. I had high hopes that between SVG and Canvas that someone would create a flash replacement, but it hasn't happened yet.
- nicetryguy 6y ago
  Agreed. Adobe severely mismanaged Macromedia's baby. They kept adding features at a frantic pace while breaking core functionality. I remember AS3 being so broken by the early 2010s i wasn't even sure anymore if my code was wrong or Flash was just broken... It is shocking in retrospect a technology with all but 100% market share went to zero in just a few years with no suitable replacement in many respects. A WASM / Node / Canvas combination with a development GUI similar to Flash that all but bypasses HTML and CSS would be amazing; and if done correctly, possibly revolutionary. It is my dream project for some future time....