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I'm excited for this; flash is still wholly unmatched as an artistic expression tool. HTML5 and WebAssembly can, obviously, provide the technical chops; but we'

I'm excited for this; flash is still wholly unmatched as an artistic expression tool. HTML5 and WebAssembly can, obviously, provide the technical chops; but we've never recovered the experience of a novice Flash user who, with no prior domain experience, could realize an inspired prototype game or entertaining animation in less than an hour. The tool was just that accessible, and the community that good.

jayd16 6y ago
Whats missing from modern tools?
- danbolt 6y ago
  I don’t think anything feature-wise is missing on the runtime side, but Flash’s keyframe/editor setup just let people make the most amazing things.
  - gabereiser 6y ago
    Stickdeath comes to mind. 2advanced studios work. All the amazing bitmap effects. Flash was really easy to create interactive scenes as your site. Each one different from another. Each one a masterpiece of art and layers and effects taken from gaming and VFX/Film. I miss that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad flash it dead, but I really miss the beautiful sites it enabled.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    Isn't Adobe Animate the same thing, keyframes and everything, just with html output?
    - HeckFeck 6y ago
      It's probably harder to pirate now.
    - patates 6y ago
      It also supports Javascript now, and they seemed to have deprecated AS1 & 2 support. I've even seen some TS definitions on the internet.
    - Arainach 6y ago
      Animate is only available as part of a $236/yr subscription and can't be purchased. Flash was far more attainable.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Yeah, mostly piracy. So it doesn't matter.
    - andai 6y ago
      I talked to several people who used to make Flash animations and games, and none of them had even heard of Animate -- they were under the impression that Flash was dead and there was nothing like it anymore. (Turns out it's literally the same thing with an uglier splash screen and includes the HTML5 plugin by default.)
- echelon 6y ago
  Flash was really special. The design philosophy behind flash was to let you make animations and interactive content. The design philosophy behind html/css/js/web stack is a composable system of modules that can be bundled, used to center objects, and plumb state to components. Flash was on another level. The web hasn't been the same since it left us.
  - emayljames 6y ago
    Using Adobe Animate (previously called Adobe Flash {something?}) you can create all the same content you could previously exporting to html5/JS/CSS.
- ivanhoe 6y ago
  Which modern tools you have in mind?
- danShumway 6y ago
  It's a combination of a lot of things. In theory, Adobe Animate still exists today, but it's wildly inaccessible both because of cost and its proprietary nature. There's also complications based on how PWA get deployed to mobile, etc... But ignoring all of that, here's a quick list of (some) categories of things I still miss from Flash: - nested animations/clips: The recursive nature of Flash made making animations very fast. It also opened up some workflows with AS2 that were not particularly scalable, but that were excellent for fast prototyping. This is the biggest thing I miss when I open programs like Aseprite. I can't begin to describe how great it was for programming to be able to embed code inside of animation, and have the entire thing be a clip that could be embedded inside another program. Doing stuff like point-and-click games with that workflow was so fast and easy, and it was so easy to build up animations with a lot of disparate parts. - a content-first workflow: related to the above, Flash let you switch between coding and content very quickly without worrying about stuff like imports. The fact that the content/animation and coding were so synchronized was a different way of thinking about architecture. There were problems associated with it when it came to scalability and organization, but again, just very fast to work with, very accessible, and lent itself to a certain way of thinking about prototypes that had some big advantages. When you had an idea you could be switching back and forth from code to animation constantly, you didn't have to alt-tab or export anything. - AS2: maybe controversial, because AS3 was pretty popular and a lot of programmers were campaigning hard that it was the "correct" way to do things, but again, I want to stress the weird combination of content/animation/code was part of what made Flash special, and abstracting some of that out and having more "professional" content pipelines and different ways of doing events and organizing everything -- I think something was lost with that transition. - Also just, in general, the animation tools were good. I don't know of an Open Source (or shared source) tool that has the same level of animation tools. Blender is doing some really compelling stuff that I'm very excited about, but Greasepencil is not a substitute for Flash, it's going in its own direction, and it's much less accessible. Aseprite is great (being able to tag frames and export data about them is handy), but it has some quirks and annoyances around the timeline controls. It's also just a lot more limited, you're basically forced to do frame-by-frame animation. There are some programs that I see animators online using that seem to be very powerful, but they're often either quite expensive or so restrictive and narrowly targeted that I'm not even willing to think about using them. - And again, I can't stress enough: even just as an animation tool, even forgetting about games, adding scripting to animations is useful. You can have a movie clip that repeats until you hit a frame and throw an event. You can have a hand-animated scene with a procedurally animated background. And that's all really, really fast to do because the way the UX is set up you just have everything accessible at the same time. ---- I don't think it would be impossible to replicate some of the things that made Flash great, and if someone really took the time to sit down and think about what made that workflow what it was, I don't think it would be impossible to make a Flash replacement considerably better than Flash. Flash had bad audio tools, its data formats were all closed down, it wasn't really extensible, it's drawing tools could have been better, and for most of its life it was terrible if you wanted to do anything with non-vector content. There are big improvements that an Open replacement could make. It would be an uphill battle, because the ecosystem surrounding Flash didn't just exist because of Flash. There are a bunch of different factors that went into it. And there are some APIs on the web that are still annoying. Mobile support for web games is still annoying. Controller support is not great, rumble isn't really supported. There's stuff we could do better. But the core functionality that old-school Flash needed is mostly there, and we could have (functionally) a Flash replacement today. It also wouldn't need to be a web app, you could have a Flash replacement that targeted the web for compilation that itself ran as a native app, and that would be completely fine. Heck, you could have one that didn't target the web. Obviously I'm thinking first about the web, but if there was a Flash-equivalent Open Source prototyping tool that targeted Linux/Windows, that would also be great, and as far as I know that kind of tool also doesn't exist today. It could be done, it would just be a lot of work to build, and tricky to get right and to get polished. The really weird reality is that as far as I can tell, no one's ever tried to build a Flash successor that actually imitated the features I care about in Flash. There are plenty of game dev platforms, some very easy to use, but very few of them have great content creation tools baked in, very few are experimenting with completely novel approaches to architecture like Flash's movie clip system.
LASR 6y ago
Ironic that “accessibility” was one of the downsides to flash as opposed to html5. But I agree with you.
fooker 6y ago
> The tool was just that accessible, and the community that good. The tool is exactly the same and it outputs html\js now.
- dleslie 6y ago
  Not quite. Animate exists, but acquiring it is prohibitively expensive. Flash was popular in no small part because it was easily pirated, and so cheap as free. Animate requires a prohibitively expensive yearly subscription fee.
have_faith 6y ago
Having to account for responsiveness kills a lot of creativity regardless of the tools used. Amateurs also used to hand craft unique and interesting Geocities websites but responsiveness has really hampered how easy and accessible that is.
- imbnwa 6y ago
  I would add that Canvas' performance profile is not the same as the Flash runtime either, you can't just layer on top of layer with Canvas and not give a F like Animate/Flash let you do. Artists/amateurs don't want to have to think about performance tuning across browsers.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
skrebbel 6y ago
Agree! It's not just unmatched on the web, for many purposes it's unmatched across the board. I remember reading that the English cartoon Duggee (which also happens to be my favourite children's show by far) is 100% animated in Flash. Get this, it's a professional, prime time, internationally syndicated TV show and they use Flash because it let's the animators be more productive than anything else.
- m_t 6y ago
  There has been so many cartoons made in flash, with great artistic result. Well, turns out there's a wikipedia page on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_television_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis... Even Family Guy started with Flash!
salamanderman 6y ago
I haven't used Unity, but I'm often surprised that it hasn't taken this niche.
- MattRix 6y ago
  This really isn’t what Unity does. Unity is mostly just the engine and level editor. The thing that made Flash special was that it was a complete vector animation authoring tool first, before you get to all the scripting etc.

jayd16 6y ago

Whats missing from modern tools?

danbolt 6y ago
I don’t think anything feature-wise is missing on the runtime side, but Flash’s keyframe/editor setup just let people make the most amazing things.
- gabereiser 6y ago
  Stickdeath comes to mind. 2advanced studios work. All the amazing bitmap effects. Flash was really easy to create interactive scenes as your site. Each one different from another. Each one a masterpiece of art and layers and effects taken from gaming and VFX/Film. I miss that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad flash it dead, but I really miss the beautiful sites it enabled.
- coldtea 6y ago
  Isn't Adobe Animate the same thing, keyframes and everything, just with html output?
  - HeckFeck 6y ago
    It's probably harder to pirate now.
  - patates 6y ago
    It also supports Javascript now, and they seemed to have deprecated AS1 & 2 support. I've even seen some TS definitions on the internet.
  - Arainach 6y ago
    Animate is only available as part of a $236/yr subscription and can't be purchased. Flash was far more attainable.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Yeah, mostly piracy. So it doesn't matter.
  - andai 6y ago
    I talked to several people who used to make Flash animations and games, and none of them had even heard of Animate -- they were under the impression that Flash was dead and there was nothing like it anymore. (Turns out it's literally the same thing with an uglier splash screen and includes the HTML5 plugin by default.)
echelon 6y ago
Flash was really special. The design philosophy behind flash was to let you make animations and interactive content. The design philosophy behind html/css/js/web stack is a composable system of modules that can be bundled, used to center objects, and plumb state to components. Flash was on another level. The web hasn't been the same since it left us.
- emayljames 6y ago
  Using Adobe Animate (previously called Adobe Flash {something?}) you can create all the same content you could previously exporting to html5/JS/CSS.
ivanhoe 6y ago
Which modern tools you have in mind?
danShumway 6y ago
It's a combination of a lot of things. In theory, Adobe Animate still exists today, but it's wildly inaccessible both because of cost and its proprietary nature. There's also complications based on how PWA get deployed to mobile, etc... But ignoring all of that, here's a quick list of (some) categories of things I still miss from Flash: - nested animations/clips: The recursive nature of Flash made making animations very fast. It also opened up some workflows with AS2 that were not particularly scalable, but that were excellent for fast prototyping. This is the biggest thing I miss when I open programs like Aseprite. I can't begin to describe how great it was for programming to be able to embed code inside of animation, and have the entire thing be a clip that could be embedded inside another program. Doing stuff like point-and-click games with that workflow was so fast and easy, and it was so easy to build up animations with a lot of disparate parts. - a content-first workflow: related to the above, Flash let you switch between coding and content very quickly without worrying about stuff like imports. The fact that the content/animation and coding were so synchronized was a different way of thinking about architecture. There were problems associated with it when it came to scalability and organization, but again, just very fast to work with, very accessible, and lent itself to a certain way of thinking about prototypes that had some big advantages. When you had an idea you could be switching back and forth from code to animation constantly, you didn't have to alt-tab or export anything. - AS2: maybe controversial, because AS3 was pretty popular and a lot of programmers were campaigning hard that it was the "correct" way to do things, but again, I want to stress the weird combination of content/animation/code was part of what made Flash special, and abstracting some of that out and having more "professional" content pipelines and different ways of doing events and organizing everything -- I think something was lost with that transition. - Also just, in general, the animation tools were good. I don't know of an Open Source (or shared source) tool that has the same level of animation tools. Blender is doing some really compelling stuff that I'm very excited about, but Greasepencil is not a substitute for Flash, it's going in its own direction, and it's much less accessible. Aseprite is great (being able to tag frames and export data about them is handy), but it has some quirks and annoyances around the timeline controls. It's also just a lot more limited, you're basically forced to do frame-by-frame animation. There are some programs that I see animators online using that seem to be very powerful, but they're often either quite expensive or so restrictive and narrowly targeted that I'm not even willing to think about using them. - And again, I can't stress enough: even just as an animation tool, even forgetting about games, adding scripting to animations is useful. You can have a movie clip that repeats until you hit a frame and throw an event. You can have a hand-animated scene with a procedurally animated background. And that's all really, really fast to do because the way the UX is set up you just have everything accessible at the same time. ---- I don't think it would be impossible to replicate some of the things that made Flash great, and if someone really took the time to sit down and think about what made that workflow what it was, I don't think it would be impossible to make a Flash replacement considerably better than Flash. Flash had bad audio tools, its data formats were all closed down, it wasn't really extensible, it's drawing tools could have been better, and for most of its life it was terrible if you wanted to do anything with non-vector content. There are big improvements that an Open replacement could make. It would be an uphill battle, because the ecosystem surrounding Flash didn't just exist because of Flash. There are a bunch of different factors that went into it. And there are some APIs on the web that are still annoying. Mobile support for web games is still annoying. Controller support is not great, rumble isn't really supported. There's stuff we could do better. But the core functionality that old-school Flash needed is mostly there, and we could have (functionally) a Flash replacement today. It also wouldn't need to be a web app, you could have a Flash replacement that targeted the web for compilation that itself ran as a native app, and that would be completely fine. Heck, you could have one that didn't target the web. Obviously I'm thinking first about the web, but if there was a Flash-equivalent Open Source prototyping tool that targeted Linux/Windows, that would also be great, and as far as I know that kind of tool also doesn't exist today. It could be done, it would just be a lot of work to build, and tricky to get right and to get polished. The really weird reality is that as far as I can tell, no one's ever tried to build a Flash successor that actually imitated the features I care about in Flash. There are plenty of game dev platforms, some very easy to use, but very few of them have great content creation tools baked in, very few are experimenting with completely novel approaches to architecture like Flash's movie clip system.

LASR 6y ago

Ironic that “accessibility” was one of the downsides to flash as opposed to html5. But I agree with you.

fooker 6y ago

> The tool was just that accessible, and the community that good. The tool is exactly the same and it outputs html\js now.

dleslie 6y ago
Not quite. Animate exists, but acquiring it is prohibitively expensive. Flash was popular in no small part because it was easily pirated, and so cheap as free. Animate requires a prohibitively expensive yearly subscription fee.

have_faith 6y ago

Having to account for responsiveness kills a lot of creativity regardless of the tools used. Amateurs also used to hand craft unique and interesting Geocities websites but responsiveness has really hampered how easy and accessible that is.

imbnwa 6y ago
I would add that Canvas' performance profile is not the same as the Flash runtime either, you can't just layer on top of layer with Canvas and not give a F like Animate/Flash let you do. Artists/amateurs don't want to have to think about performance tuning across browsers.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

skrebbel 6y ago

Agree! It's not just unmatched on the web, for many purposes it's unmatched across the board. I remember reading that the English cartoon Duggee (which also happens to be my favourite children's show by far) is 100% animated in Flash. Get this, it's a professional, prime time, internationally syndicated TV show and they use Flash because it let's the animators be more productive than anything else.

m_t 6y ago
There has been so many cartoons made in flash, with great artistic result. Well, turns out there's a wikipedia page on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_television_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis... Even Family Guy started with Flash!

salamanderman 6y ago

I haven't used Unity, but I'm often surprised that it hasn't taken this niche.

MattRix 6y ago
This really isn’t what Unity does. Unity is mostly just the engine and level editor. The thing that made Flash special was that it was a complete vector animation authoring tool first, before you get to all the scripting etc.