14 ms·

Back in the day I used to do quite a lot of Macromedia Flash work. It’s uncannily similar but a modern take. I’ve often wondered why no one has come up with a

by junto 3y ago

Back in the day I used to do quite a lot of Macromedia Flash work. It’s uncannily similar but a modern take. I’ve often wondered why no one has come up with a new product in this space. I think the long term demise of Flash has put off anyone even trying. There are so many great uses for animations on the web, even if we don’t need full blown user interfaces of them and intro screens like we did back in 2002. Great job!

ramraj07 3y ago
Isn’t adobe animate just flash ?
- lukan 3y ago
  No, since flash is no longer around. Meaning you can still create all the animations and games, but then you will have to try to port it to js and canvas (via easeljs). And that did not work very nicely last time I tried it.
  - eloeffler 3y ago
    There is also ruffle which seems to be doing a very good job at reviving Flash animations. The Internet Archive is using it to preserve the profound cultural heritage of early millenial flash animations. https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/19/21578616/internet-archive-preservation-flash-animations-games-adobe https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/19/21578616/internet-archiv...
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    The Flash player is gone, but the authoring software called Adobe Flash was just rebranded to Adobe Animate. Back in the Flash times Flash was quite popular for Western-style 2d animation, and a lot of TV series were produced in Flash. Animate has been keeping that somewhat alive, though better alternatives have emerged.
    - chongli 3y ago
      Yeah. For all the hate the Flash player got back in the day, the authoring software (which was Macromedia Flash when I last used it) was awesome. It has really nice motion interpolation (tweening) and onion-skinning tools. For Western animation this meant you didn’t need to outsource all the in-between work.
    - lukan 3y ago
      Yeah, I was talking about Adobe Animate. It is not at all as useful as flash was, without exporting to flash. Exporting to html/canvas is a pain.
  - themagician 3y ago
    When was the last time you tried it? Because I had a similar experience, and a young animator told me that they were using this in a production envrioment now and I was shocked. Adobe Animate was hot garbage after Flash died, but I recently (like two weeks ago) sat down with it for a bit and I have to say it feels quite good. It seems like there was a time period where Adobe was focused on Animate exporting to canvas and they sort of abandoned that and just turned it into a tool that would export to video. It can do both, but really Animate now is just, "Adboe Illustrator but for animation." So it's not exactly a direct replacement, it's more like Flash without ActionScript, but with some tools to kind of point you in the right direction for canvas + js.
    - lukan 3y ago
      Some months ago and my conclusion was the same, useful enough for videos, too clumsy for interactive flash, so useless for my needs.
Closi 3y ago
Totally agree! The major feature missing compared to Flash would be library and component support - i.e. the ability to create reusable animated graphics that you can drag onto the canvas (with infinite nesting). i.e. you can animate a bird with flapping wings, then drag 3 copies onto your sky.
- lukan 3y ago
  In flash you could also select any element and add a onclick handler. Bam, a button. Or play a different animation of a subelement on mouseover e.g. bird.flapWings() And quite some other things .. This is not a flash replacement and also does not aim to be one.
  - Closi 3y ago
    To clarify, I mainly meant the major animation feature that let you do more complex animations compared to this tool.
- albert_e 3y ago
  Yes I absolutely loved that. I wish Microsoft PowerPoint built some of that so we could use it for light weight animations and story telling.
  - fransje26 3y ago
    > Microsoft [...] light weight [...] And interesting choice of words!
- brycedriesenga 3y ago
  Rive can do that!
jonplackett 3y ago
Absolutely agree. The interface was what made flash so good because it let non-coders make things. So sad that Adobe were unwilling / unable to just make it output html5 instead of swf. But Adobe so where software goes to die so…
niklasrde 3y ago
Airbnb's Lottie has a Web Player now I think? Make your animation in AE or Figma, export to "Lottie JSON" with players in JS, Swift, Kotlin & React Native.
rprwhite 3y ago
I think this might be right up your alley, along with some of the children comments: https://rive.app https://rive.app It’s pretty much modern Macromedia Flash. Except a JS runtime, rather than plugin.
- erikig 3y ago
  I was going to suggest Rive too. I came across them when I was trying to figure out how Duolingo's animations were done, pretty cool tool. For Trangram - it might help to link each of the examples in the "Explore & Get Inspired" section to the editor, allowing new users to avoid the "blank page" syndrome.
jaysonelliot 3y ago
IMO, Flash died because it didn't play nice with the conventions of the web. There were workarounds, but generally it broke all of the things HTML could do, like being searchable & selectable, navigable with a keyboard, built of code you could inspect, addressable with a direct link, even working with the browser's back button. The actual animations and (sometimes) beautiful interfaces were not the problem. People generally loved that. Generally there's no need for a new product in this space because CSS does everything Flash once did, but adheres to web conventions. There probably is an opportunity, though. I'm not a motion graphics person - does Adobe Animate fit the bill at all? What do you think is missing today that we once had with Flash?
- dncornholio 3y ago
  Meanwhile we didn't have a replacement, and any replacement lacks of all the features you list, text selection, etc. It got killed because Apple stopped supporting it. That's the reason.
  - malauxyeux 3y ago
    > It got killed because Apple stopped supporting it. That's how it happened in my orbit anyway. Steve Jobs published an open letter entitled "Thoughts on Flash", in which he said that iOS would never support Flash. We had a discussion at the web shop I was working for; we decided to stop making new things in Flash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash
    - dugmartin 3y ago
      Fun story: Apple demoed the iPad to Hollywood execs a couple weeks before the release. The Hollywood folks saw all their web properties rendering almost no UI and their video content not available. I worked for a boutique consulting firm at that time and Warner Bros/Telepictures was our big client. We immediately got calls from a lot of execs and I had a week long firedrill of converting MANY Telepictures properties from Flash (mostly for the video content rendering with timecoded UI updates). They also had a video delivery company that was co-located with AOL fly out to Burbank and fly back with tons of hard drives full of episodes of Ellen, the Tyra Banks show, etc to recode from Flash video to video that could be served with the <video> content tag on iPads. It somehow all got done by the iPad release and Apple published a top 10 "sites that work great on iPad" page on their site and we had done 4 out of 10 of them. All we had to test on was desktop Safari resized to the screen size they told us it needed to work on.
tmaly 3y ago
I also recall that Flash had a ton of security issues.
henrun12 3y ago
There's actually quite a few new tools that do "animation for the web". I'm sure there's a longer list but the ones I've used are rive, jitter, fable, and lottielab. Rive is interesting but the one I find myself coming back to is lottielab, it feels the most like the "spend 4 minutes playing around, but now I have something that looks really cool" that I used to get when using flash
raytopia 3y ago
Wick Editor is another one. https://www.wickeditor.com/#/ https://www.wickeditor.com/#/
- grounder 3y ago
  Wick looks fun. Looking at the Github repo, it looks like it isn't in active development anymore.
PaulHoule 3y ago
Adobe’s Flash editor got renamed to Adobe Animate. People mostly use it now to export video but there is more than one HTML 5 viewer it will export for, these support most of what Flash supported except for a few unusual geometric primitives.

by junto 3y ago

ramraj07 3y ago

Isn’t adobe animate just flash ?

lukan 3y ago
No, since flash is no longer around. Meaning you can still create all the animations and games, but then you will have to try to port it to js and canvas (via easeljs). And that did not work very nicely last time I tried it.
- eloeffler 3y ago
  There is also ruffle which seems to be doing a very good job at reviving Flash animations. The Internet Archive is using it to preserve the profound cultural heritage of early millenial flash animations. https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/19/21578616/internet-archive-preservation-flash-animations-games-adobe https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/19/21578616/internet-archiv...
- wongarsu 3y ago
  The Flash player is gone, but the authoring software called Adobe Flash was just rebranded to Adobe Animate. Back in the Flash times Flash was quite popular for Western-style 2d animation, and a lot of TV series were produced in Flash. Animate has been keeping that somewhat alive, though better alternatives have emerged.
  - chongli 3y ago
    Yeah. For all the hate the Flash player got back in the day, the authoring software (which was Macromedia Flash when I last used it) was awesome. It has really nice motion interpolation (tweening) and onion-skinning tools. For Western animation this meant you didn’t need to outsource all the in-between work.
  - lukan 3y ago
    Yeah, I was talking about Adobe Animate. It is not at all as useful as flash was, without exporting to flash. Exporting to html/canvas is a pain.
- themagician 3y ago
  When was the last time you tried it? Because I had a similar experience, and a young animator told me that they were using this in a production envrioment now and I was shocked. Adobe Animate was hot garbage after Flash died, but I recently (like two weeks ago) sat down with it for a bit and I have to say it feels quite good. It seems like there was a time period where Adobe was focused on Animate exporting to canvas and they sort of abandoned that and just turned it into a tool that would export to video. It can do both, but really Animate now is just, "Adboe Illustrator but for animation." So it's not exactly a direct replacement, it's more like Flash without ActionScript, but with some tools to kind of point you in the right direction for canvas + js.
  - lukan 3y ago
    Some months ago and my conclusion was the same, useful enough for videos, too clumsy for interactive flash, so useless for my needs.

Closi 3y ago

Totally agree! The major feature missing compared to Flash would be library and component support - i.e. the ability to create reusable animated graphics that you can drag onto the canvas (with infinite nesting). i.e. you can animate a bird with flapping wings, then drag 3 copies onto your sky.

lukan 3y ago
In flash you could also select any element and add a onclick handler. Bam, a button. Or play a different animation of a subelement on mouseover e.g. bird.flapWings() And quite some other things .. This is not a flash replacement and also does not aim to be one.
- Closi 3y ago
  To clarify, I mainly meant the major animation feature that let you do more complex animations compared to this tool.
albert_e 3y ago
Yes I absolutely loved that. I wish Microsoft PowerPoint built some of that so we could use it for light weight animations and story telling.
- fransje26 3y ago
  > Microsoft [...] light weight [...] And interesting choice of words!
brycedriesenga 3y ago
Rive can do that!

jonplackett 3y ago

Absolutely agree. The interface was what made flash so good because it let non-coders make things. So sad that Adobe were unwilling / unable to just make it output html5 instead of swf. But Adobe so where software goes to die so…

niklasrde 3y ago

Airbnb's Lottie has a Web Player now I think? Make your animation in AE or Figma, export to "Lottie JSON" with players in JS, Swift, Kotlin & React Native.

rprwhite 3y ago

I think this might be right up your alley, along with some of the children comments: https://rive.app https://rive.app It’s pretty much modern Macromedia Flash. Except a JS runtime, rather than plugin.

erikig 3y ago
I was going to suggest Rive too. I came across them when I was trying to figure out how Duolingo's animations were done, pretty cool tool. For Trangram - it might help to link each of the examples in the "Explore & Get Inspired" section to the editor, allowing new users to avoid the "blank page" syndrome.

jaysonelliot 3y ago

IMO, Flash died because it didn't play nice with the conventions of the web. There were workarounds, but generally it broke all of the things HTML could do, like being searchable & selectable, navigable with a keyboard, built of code you could inspect, addressable with a direct link, even working with the browser's back button. The actual animations and (sometimes) beautiful interfaces were not the problem. People generally loved that. Generally there's no need for a new product in this space because CSS does everything Flash once did, but adheres to web conventions. There probably is an opportunity, though. I'm not a motion graphics person - does Adobe Animate fit the bill at all? What do you think is missing today that we once had with Flash?

dncornholio 3y ago
Meanwhile we didn't have a replacement, and any replacement lacks of all the features you list, text selection, etc. It got killed because Apple stopped supporting it. That's the reason.
- malauxyeux 3y ago
  > It got killed because Apple stopped supporting it. That's how it happened in my orbit anyway. Steve Jobs published an open letter entitled "Thoughts on Flash", in which he said that iOS would never support Flash. We had a discussion at the web shop I was working for; we decided to stop making new things in Flash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash
  - dugmartin 3y ago
    Fun story: Apple demoed the iPad to Hollywood execs a couple weeks before the release. The Hollywood folks saw all their web properties rendering almost no UI and their video content not available. I worked for a boutique consulting firm at that time and Warner Bros/Telepictures was our big client. We immediately got calls from a lot of execs and I had a week long firedrill of converting MANY Telepictures properties from Flash (mostly for the video content rendering with timecoded UI updates). They also had a video delivery company that was co-located with AOL fly out to Burbank and fly back with tons of hard drives full of episodes of Ellen, the Tyra Banks show, etc to recode from Flash video to video that could be served with the <video> content tag on iPads. It somehow all got done by the iPad release and Apple published a top 10 "sites that work great on iPad" page on their site and we had done 4 out of 10 of them. All we had to test on was desktop Safari resized to the screen size they told us it needed to work on.

tmaly 3y ago

I also recall that Flash had a ton of security issues.

henrun12 3y ago

There's actually quite a few new tools that do "animation for the web". I'm sure there's a longer list but the ones I've used are rive, jitter, fable, and lottielab. Rive is interesting but the one I find myself coming back to is lottielab, it feels the most like the "spend 4 minutes playing around, but now I have something that looks really cool" that I used to get when using flash

raytopia 3y ago

Wick Editor is another one. https://www.wickeditor.com/#/ https://www.wickeditor.com/#/

grounder 3y ago
Wick looks fun. Looking at the Github repo, it looks like it isn't in active development anymore.

PaulHoule 3y ago

Adobe’s Flash editor got renamed to Adobe Animate. People mostly use it now to export video but there is more than one HTML 5 viewer it will export for, these support most of what Flash supported except for a few unusual geometric primitives.