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> To this day, there are things that's were easy in Flash that are borderline impossible on the web... My only experience with Flash is playing Flash games, he

> To this day, there are things that's were easy in Flash that are borderline impossible on the web... My only experience with Flash is playing Flash games, heh. What would you say made Flash so powerful to achieve such things?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bsimpson 3y ago
That's a longer answer than I have scope to type right now… The short version is the seamless interplay between drawn and coded objects. The viewport was called a Stage (Illustrator's equivalent is the Artboard). The Flash tool had all the vector drawing goodies you'd expect. Everything you drew on the Stage was a DisplayObject. Everything you coded was also a DisplayObject. Things that were easier to draw than code, you would create in the Flash app. Things that were parametric (e.g. you want 200 of them, or you want to explain in code how a thing moves), you'd code. You could easily import drawn assets into code, or drag visual containers for coded assets onto the Stage. Modern JavaScript does an okay job at the coded aspect of it, but first class support for hand-drawn assets is totally missing. SVG (Adobe's attempt to compete with Flash before they bought it) can handle still images, but nothing is seamlessly multi-modal like Flash was. The other thing Flash had going for it that nothing else does is animation. Even today, motion designers are stuck using After Effects (a tool designed for movie titles and broadcast news graphics). We still don't have a good tool for making interfaces that move, which means our ability to make properly interactive interfaces was severely knee-capped when Flash was removed. So Flash let you draw and animate at whatever level of fidelity you wanted - draw an arm, animate a progress indicator - and use those assets seamlessly in code. Or code the parts that are painful to draw and lay everything out visually. It really let you use the best tool for the job, and it provided some best-in-class tools for those parts of the job that still aren't matched today. PS: One of the coolest parts of Flash that nobody talks about was its ability to treat vectors like clay. Illustrator and the tools it inspired make you compose a vector out of points and bezier handles. Vector creation in those tools requires deft use of barely-abstracted math - it's a craft that's hard to master. In Flash, on the other hand, you could just push and pull on the edge of a shape until it looked how you wanted. It abstracted the bezier into a more humane form, and that's just one of countless microtools that we lost when we lost Flash.
- throwitaway1123 3y ago
  > The other thing Flash had going for it that nothing else does is animation. Even today, motion designers are stuck using After Effects (a tool designed for movie titles and broadcast news graphics). We still don't have a good tool for making interfaces that move, which means our ability to make properly interactive interfaces was severely knee-capped when Flash was removed. We definitely need an easy to use GUI for building complex animations. Exporting animations from After Effects via Lottie is not an ideal solution. Maybe Rive or some other startup will fully supplant this workflow at some point.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bsimpson 3y ago

That's a longer answer than I have scope to type right now… The short version is the seamless interplay between drawn and coded objects. The viewport was called a Stage (Illustrator's equivalent is the Artboard). The Flash tool had all the vector drawing goodies you'd expect. Everything you drew on the Stage was a DisplayObject. Everything you coded was also a DisplayObject. Things that were easier to draw than code, you would create in the Flash app. Things that were parametric (e.g. you want 200 of them, or you want to explain in code how a thing moves), you'd code. You could easily import drawn assets into code, or drag visual containers for coded assets onto the Stage. Modern JavaScript does an okay job at the coded aspect of it, but first class support for hand-drawn assets is totally missing. SVG (Adobe's attempt to compete with Flash before they bought it) can handle still images, but nothing is seamlessly multi-modal like Flash was. The other thing Flash had going for it that nothing else does is animation. Even today, motion designers are stuck using After Effects (a tool designed for movie titles and broadcast news graphics). We still don't have a good tool for making interfaces that move, which means our ability to make properly interactive interfaces was severely knee-capped when Flash was removed. So Flash let you draw and animate at whatever level of fidelity you wanted - draw an arm, animate a progress indicator - and use those assets seamlessly in code. Or code the parts that are painful to draw and lay everything out visually. It really let you use the best tool for the job, and it provided some best-in-class tools for those parts of the job that still aren't matched today. PS: One of the coolest parts of Flash that nobody talks about was its ability to treat vectors like clay. Illustrator and the tools it inspired make you compose a vector out of points and bezier handles. Vector creation in those tools requires deft use of barely-abstracted math - it's a craft that's hard to master. In Flash, on the other hand, you could just push and pull on the edge of a shape until it looked how you wanted. It abstracted the bezier into a more humane form, and that's just one of countless microtools that we lost when we lost Flash.

throwitaway1123 3y ago
> The other thing Flash had going for it that nothing else does is animation. Even today, motion designers are stuck using After Effects (a tool designed for movie titles and broadcast news graphics). We still don't have a good tool for making interfaces that move, which means our ability to make properly interactive interfaces was severely knee-capped when Flash was removed. We definitely need an easy to use GUI for building complex animations. Exporting animations from After Effects via Lottie is not an ideal solution. Maybe Rive or some other startup will fully supplant this workflow at some point.