3 ms·

> I remember being amazed by the sophistication of the animations some Flash developers could put together using it and I always wondered if the tooling made it

> I remember being amazed by the sophistication of the animations some Flash developers could put together using it and I always wondered if the tooling made it easier, or if somebody painstakingly drew cells one by one and then spliced them together with an otherwise relatively dumb video creator. Flash/Flash Pro/Adobe Animate (it has been renamed now) is sophisticated animation software that just happened to have the flash plugin as one output format. A large number of cartoons for broadcast tv have been made in it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_television_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...) and it still exists despite the demise of the flash plugin. It's definitely not just the same as splicing individual frames together.

themodelplumber 6y ago
Just as a data point, I have a car designer friend who absolutely loved drawing in Flash. He said he found the drawing tools really intuitive. At the studio we worked for, he used a StudioMax plugin to export model imagery and animations to SWF and would polish things from there. Also IMO the AA used in Adobe software was pretty impressive, at least in the early 00s.
- Borlands 6y ago
  it was all Macromedia at one time (before Adobe felt the competition, bought the whole company and rebranded the suite that included Flash). Macromedia Director had an even more powerful set of tools, until Macromedia Flash evolved the ActionScript language and with web dissemination really took over.
- interestica 6y ago
  Flash (Animate) is still my favourite mockup and design tool. It used to be so much more powerful in that you could export to a lot of different formats. And when your output is just some standard format, it didn't matter what the creation tool was. I could manoeuvre faster in that application than any other tool. And the bonus was that for anything you designed, it was almost trivial to animate it. I now find myself doing svg animation using it + plugins. Adobe has constantly killed features in it but I still love it.

themodelplumber 6y ago

Just as a data point, I have a car designer friend who absolutely loved drawing in Flash. He said he found the drawing tools really intuitive. At the studio we worked for, he used a StudioMax plugin to export model imagery and animations to SWF and would polish things from there. Also IMO the AA used in Adobe software was pretty impressive, at least in the early 00s.

Borlands 6y ago
it was all Macromedia at one time (before Adobe felt the competition, bought the whole company and rebranded the suite that included Flash). Macromedia Director had an even more powerful set of tools, until Macromedia Flash evolved the ActionScript language and with web dissemination really took over.
interestica 6y ago
Flash (Animate) is still my favourite mockup and design tool. It used to be so much more powerful in that you could export to a lot of different formats. And when your output is just some standard format, it didn't matter what the creation tool was. I could manoeuvre faster in that application than any other tool. And the bonus was that for anything you designed, it was almost trivial to animate it. I now find myself doing svg animation using it + plugins. Adobe has constantly killed features in it but I still love it.