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I hate to say it but man, I miss Flash!! The websites, interactions and animations we were able to create in it 20 years ago..! There is still nothing that come

I hate to say it but man, I miss Flash!! The websites, interactions and animations we were able to create in it 20 years ago..! There is still nothing that comes close to productivity and quality of output. I am disappointed that Adobe butchered Flash and wasn’t able to come up with modern and mobile friendly version. The war with Apple should have pushed them forward. Instead they gave up.

CommanderData 5y ago
It truly did allow for very artistic interactive assets. The ide, tooling, actionscript were quite revolutionary. Today it could be a paradox of choice situation, for an aspiring creator to produce anything today would require them to pick up a bundle of technologies.
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
By the time Adobe bought it they didn’t really care that much about the animation and app side of Flash. Seemed to mostly care about it being the video delivery mechanism for the web.
silverlyra 5y ago
Shameless plug: I'm an engineer at Fable, a browser-based motion graphics editor. We're working to make creating animations more accessible, exactly like the heyday of Flash (but without any binary plugins). And we support exporting to Lottie. https://fable.app https://fable.app And of course, if you're an engineer and this appeals to you, get in touch! Email in my profile. I love working on software that facilitates creativity.
- yaomtc 5y ago
  Thanks for building for the browser, so Linux users like me can use it easily. While native code has its advantages, web apps are getting closer and can be easier to build.
k__ 5y ago
Again, mindset beat technology. ActionScript and Flex were more powerful than JavaScript and HTML, still the latter won because it was open.
- elondaits 5y ago
  Not just open. The standard underlying model in Flash is a stage with fixed dimensions. Great for arcade games and animations, but bad for responsive or being readable in various screen sizes. HTML can be a pain when you want to create sophisticated UI layouts, but by default it’s readable on all screens and reflows content automatically.
  - simion314 5y ago
    Flash/Silverlight could have worked for SPAs and we could have keep js/css simple for pure document pages. I did Adobe Air desktop applications and there was no issue with scaling the application to different sizes, the Flex4 framework is still one of my favorites for layouting Applications GUIs for sure 10x better then web GUI frameworks, sometimes I wonder if the creators of angular ever in their life created a desktop or mobile application because for me the architecture seems stupid or created for a weird target audience.
    - k__ 5y ago
      I never understood the appeal of Angular. The first time I heard about it was on a JavaScript meetup, where a guy praised it as the best that ever happened to JS. He said multiple times "Yes, and we had some issues... but they came from the fact that we didn't do it like Angular intended, when we rewrote as the maintainers explained, it worked!" I never touched it. Went from ExtJS4, to Ember.js, to React and then I stayed there.
      - throwanem 5y ago
        The appeal of AngularJS was more or less that, somewhat like Rails, it offered a One True Way that mostly worked pretty well. Overcomplicated by today's standards, sure, but remember that AngularJS was a decade ago, back when jQuery was still king and anything like architectural rigor on the frontend had yet to be imagined. Especially with a team made up mostly of folks with less JS experience, you could better sustain velocity because you just needed one or two people who could build custom controls and otherwise handle complicated stuff, and most folks were perfectly able to build and ship features without nearly so much risk of spaghetti complications as you'd find with a less rigorous framework. That made it a good teaching and learning tool as well; you could start off a junior with a base of AngularJS-specific knowledge, and then generalize that into understanding JS proper and being able to work outside the structure AngularJS provided. I wouldn't want to go back now, but I did and led a lot of good work with AngularJS, and used it to great effect as a mentoring tool besides. In the context of its time, it was brilliant.
martin_ky 5y ago
I’m only familiar with Flash as a user, not as developer. I’m curious, what did Flash have, that you can’t readily do with JS and Canvas? Be as broad or specific as you like.
- rchaud 5y ago
  The Flash interface is primarily visual. It looks more like a video editing app, with timelines and layers. - Click button X, run Timeline 1. - Click Button Y, run Timeline 2. - Click X again, run Timeline 1 in reverse. That made it far more intuitive for designers, who can prototype interaction design ideas themselves, instead of leaving it entirely to developers to implement. The death of Flash led to the death of the creative web, because anything outside of the bounds of CMS templated content required developers to do everything from CSS, JS triggers and deployment. Even today, that workflow persists, but is worse, because creative works can't be bundled into a single executable file like what was possible w/ Flash . Designers now create something in After Effects, which then has to be compiled into code via Lottie, and implemented by a developer.
- josefrichter 5y ago
  You could “draw” the whole website, create fairly complex animations and interactions, script everything, and then just publish it. Now imagine what it means today to create a simple animation, export it to Lottie, incorporate that into a website and publish that. It’s a nightmare. And it’s nowhere near to what was possible with Flash.
- monkeynotes 5y ago
  I'd say the major advantage was you had an IDE that had a canvas to draw on, a visual timeline to aide your animation, tweening, powerful scripting - much like Swift, and compilation (ship a self contained SWF binary). For me the canvas was powerful, I could use a wacom to draw, tween motion between frames and visualize the whole thing quickly with playhead scrubbing, and keyframe tweaking etc. I don't miss Flash but it would be really interesting to see how it would be used in today's mature webscape.
  - 5y ago
root_axis 5y ago
Flash did not integrate well with the rest of the page and was an utter nightmare with respect to accessibility and responsive design. It was also buggy, prone to memory leaks and crashing, and required the end-user to install or update arbitrary code on their machine, with all the headache and security implications that necessitates. Support and performance was also horrible on mobile when it was available at all. Flash was pretty and had decent tooling, but it sucked pretty hard compared to today's options.
- josefrichter 5y ago
  Those are exactly the problems that Adobe was supposed to solve. And it’s not like it was mission impossible. I’d say everything we have today still sucks compared to Flash. Building a website with the level of interactivity, micro interactions and animations using today’s technology is super complicated and almost impossible for a single person.
  - CharlesW 5y ago
    > [Web integration, accessibility, and responsive design] are exactly the problems that Adobe was supposed to solve. And it’s not like it was mission impossible. "Solve" is weird in this context, but Adobe did make good progress in each of these areas, first by supporting some of them in Flash Player, and ultimately by abandoning the proprietary runtime. > Building a website with the level of interactivity, micro interactions and animations using today’s technology is super complicated and almost impossible for a single person. Flash was never for this (other than in a "if all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" sense), but if that's your benchmark then you can still do that with Adobe Animate.
    - relaxing 5y ago
      Some people only had the skill to wield a GUI builder/animation timeline-type hammer, and deploying to the web was the only nail that mattered. For them to have access and distribution to that audience was killer, and we’re all worse off for the lack.
- 5y ago

CommanderData 5y ago

It truly did allow for very artistic interactive assets. The ide, tooling, actionscript were quite revolutionary. Today it could be a paradox of choice situation, for an aspiring creator to produce anything today would require them to pick up a bundle of technologies.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

By the time Adobe bought it they didn’t really care that much about the animation and app side of Flash. Seemed to mostly care about it being the video delivery mechanism for the web.

silverlyra 5y ago

Shameless plug: I'm an engineer at Fable, a browser-based motion graphics editor. We're working to make creating animations more accessible, exactly like the heyday of Flash (but without any binary plugins). And we support exporting to Lottie. https://fable.app https://fable.app And of course, if you're an engineer and this appeals to you, get in touch! Email in my profile. I love working on software that facilitates creativity.

yaomtc 5y ago
Thanks for building for the browser, so Linux users like me can use it easily. While native code has its advantages, web apps are getting closer and can be easier to build.

k__ 5y ago

Again, mindset beat technology. ActionScript and Flex were more powerful than JavaScript and HTML, still the latter won because it was open.

elondaits 5y ago
Not just open. The standard underlying model in Flash is a stage with fixed dimensions. Great for arcade games and animations, but bad for responsive or being readable in various screen sizes. HTML can be a pain when you want to create sophisticated UI layouts, but by default it’s readable on all screens and reflows content automatically.
- simion314 5y ago
  Flash/Silverlight could have worked for SPAs and we could have keep js/css simple for pure document pages. I did Adobe Air desktop applications and there was no issue with scaling the application to different sizes, the Flex4 framework is still one of my favorites for layouting Applications GUIs for sure 10x better then web GUI frameworks, sometimes I wonder if the creators of angular ever in their life created a desktop or mobile application because for me the architecture seems stupid or created for a weird target audience.
  - k__ 5y ago
    I never understood the appeal of Angular. The first time I heard about it was on a JavaScript meetup, where a guy praised it as the best that ever happened to JS. He said multiple times "Yes, and we had some issues... but they came from the fact that we didn't do it like Angular intended, when we rewrote as the maintainers explained, it worked!" I never touched it. Went from ExtJS4, to Ember.js, to React and then I stayed there.
    - throwanem 5y ago
      The appeal of AngularJS was more or less that, somewhat like Rails, it offered a One True Way that mostly worked pretty well. Overcomplicated by today's standards, sure, but remember that AngularJS was a decade ago, back when jQuery was still king and anything like architectural rigor on the frontend had yet to be imagined. Especially with a team made up mostly of folks with less JS experience, you could better sustain velocity because you just needed one or two people who could build custom controls and otherwise handle complicated stuff, and most folks were perfectly able to build and ship features without nearly so much risk of spaghetti complications as you'd find with a less rigorous framework. That made it a good teaching and learning tool as well; you could start off a junior with a base of AngularJS-specific knowledge, and then generalize that into understanding JS proper and being able to work outside the structure AngularJS provided. I wouldn't want to go back now, but I did and led a lot of good work with AngularJS, and used it to great effect as a mentoring tool besides. In the context of its time, it was brilliant.

martin_ky 5y ago

I’m only familiar with Flash as a user, not as developer. I’m curious, what did Flash have, that you can’t readily do with JS and Canvas? Be as broad or specific as you like.

rchaud 5y ago
The Flash interface is primarily visual. It looks more like a video editing app, with timelines and layers. - Click button X, run Timeline 1. - Click Button Y, run Timeline 2. - Click X again, run Timeline 1 in reverse. That made it far more intuitive for designers, who can prototype interaction design ideas themselves, instead of leaving it entirely to developers to implement. The death of Flash led to the death of the creative web, because anything outside of the bounds of CMS templated content required developers to do everything from CSS, JS triggers and deployment. Even today, that workflow persists, but is worse, because creative works can't be bundled into a single executable file like what was possible w/ Flash . Designers now create something in After Effects, which then has to be compiled into code via Lottie, and implemented by a developer.
josefrichter 5y ago
You could “draw” the whole website, create fairly complex animations and interactions, script everything, and then just publish it. Now imagine what it means today to create a simple animation, export it to Lottie, incorporate that into a website and publish that. It’s a nightmare. And it’s nowhere near to what was possible with Flash.
monkeynotes 5y ago
I'd say the major advantage was you had an IDE that had a canvas to draw on, a visual timeline to aide your animation, tweening, powerful scripting - much like Swift, and compilation (ship a self contained SWF binary). For me the canvas was powerful, I could use a wacom to draw, tween motion between frames and visualize the whole thing quickly with playhead scrubbing, and keyframe tweaking etc. I don't miss Flash but it would be really interesting to see how it would be used in today's mature webscape.
- 5y ago

root_axis 5y ago

Flash did not integrate well with the rest of the page and was an utter nightmare with respect to accessibility and responsive design. It was also buggy, prone to memory leaks and crashing, and required the end-user to install or update arbitrary code on their machine, with all the headache and security implications that necessitates. Support and performance was also horrible on mobile when it was available at all. Flash was pretty and had decent tooling, but it sucked pretty hard compared to today's options.

josefrichter 5y ago
Those are exactly the problems that Adobe was supposed to solve. And it’s not like it was mission impossible. I’d say everything we have today still sucks compared to Flash. Building a website with the level of interactivity, micro interactions and animations using today’s technology is super complicated and almost impossible for a single person.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  > [Web integration, accessibility, and responsive design] are exactly the problems that Adobe was supposed to solve. And it’s not like it was mission impossible. "Solve" is weird in this context, but Adobe did make good progress in each of these areas, first by supporting some of them in Flash Player, and ultimately by abandoning the proprietary runtime. > Building a website with the level of interactivity, micro interactions and animations using today’s technology is super complicated and almost impossible for a single person. Flash was never for this (other than in a "if all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" sense), but if that's your benchmark then you can still do that with Adobe Animate.
  - relaxing 5y ago
    Some people only had the skill to wield a GUI builder/animation timeline-type hammer, and deploying to the web was the only nail that mattered. For them to have access and distribution to that audience was killer, and we’re all worse off for the lack.
5y ago