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The difference in authoring tool is the big one here. Flash let artists and even kids (like myself aged 12) start making really fun interactive websites that co
by jonplackett 6y ago
The difference in authoring tool is the big one here. Flash let artists and even kids (like myself aged 12) start making really fun interactive websites that could be hosted very very simply.
But I lay the blame for that with Adobe. Why didn’t they just adapt the Flash application to output html and JavaScript? If you can compile modern JS to old with babbel I don’t see why they couldn’t have an interpreter to turn action script into JS and render everything to a canvas. They had a massive community who would have loved it. Instead they just kinda gave up.
- rogual 6y agoThey did, sort of. Flash (now rebranded Adobe Animate) can export to HTML5, it just isn't very good. As I recall, it tries to naively export your Flash graphics as HTML5 Canvas drawing commands, but they come out all glitchy because Flash's renderer just uses a fundamentally different model (planar maps vs. stacked rendering). This probably is fixable, but I sincerely wonder whether Adobe still has the engineering skills to solve new problems like this. They've subisted for so long now by just adding new layers of janky, slow, webview-powered cloud-enhanced e-commerce integration to their existing products, that I wouldn't be surprised if most of the serious engineering talent has left.
- jonplackett 6y agoYeah Flash animate is really not targeted at proper web development. It’s more of a tiny bonus to export to html and is generally terrible. It needs to be feature parity including the ‘runs anywhere’ of an swf. I don’t even think it’s too late if they could really deliver this. Just look at the community surrounding Instagram filter development because they made really easy-to-use software (Spark AR studio) that kids and artists can use.