9 ms·

Building a new Flash

741 points by TechPlasma 7mo ago

nickpsecurity 7mo ago
I remember trying out Macromedia Flash 6.0. My GUI apps were ugly at the time. Learning to build something like I saw in the movies could take years. Then, Flash let me throw together beautiful, animated interfaces like it was nothing. One could do quite a bit after one tutorial. (Note: Quick shoutout to Dreamweaver 6.0 which was a power, WYSIWYG editor. Today, things like Pinegrow might fill the niche.) It's death as a hugely-popular tool was largely due to Apple and Adobe. SaaS model isn't helping it far as wide adoption goes. It also got popular through piracy which hints the replacement should be profitable and widely deployed like open source. I think this might be a good opportunity for a license like PolyForm Non-Commercial. Free users either can't commercialize their content or, like CompCert Compiler, must make the outputs GPL'd (or AGPL'd). The Flash replacement would have a fair, one-time price for unrestricted use with source or you share like they shared with you. What do you all think?
- mikepurvis 7mo ago
  The "pay to sell your work" model is basically what Autodesk does to provide a version of Fusion that's free/accessible to the hobby 3d printing market while still protecting their b2b revenue. I haven't looked in a while, but I believe there's music and audio production tools with similar approaches.
  - sfifs 7mo ago
    More impressively, Da Vinci Resolve is actually free with no restrictions. It is a high end video editor that film makers and professional film studios use (together with hardware and some paid features) from black magic design. Incredibly impressive. Affinity Photo and PhotoPea are also now free without restrictions.
- cosmic_cheese 7mo ago
  Of the two, I think Adobe is most responsible for the decline of Flash. Even if smartphones had never entered the picture, laptops (where efficiency is important) were quickly becoming the most common form of PC, which would've eventually made Flash as it existed under Adobe untenable as well. The timeline was just accelerated by smartphones. Honestly I can't understand the mental calculus that went on in the heads of Adobe execs at the time. Yes, cleaning up the ball of mud that the Flash codebase had become and making it not so battery hungry wouldn't have been an easy task, but it would've futureproofed it significantly. Instead they decided to keep tacking on new features which ended up being entirely the wrong decision. EDIT: The constant stream of zero-days certainly didn't help things either. A rewrite would've been worthwhile if only to get a handle on that.
  - Marazan 7mo ago
    Flash was not particularly battery hungry (My go to example when HTML 5 demos started coming out was rebuilding a HTML 5 demo that was using 100% of 1 core into a flash app that used 5%). The reason it burned CPU cycles is that non-coders could make programs with it and they would produce the world's worst code doing so that "worked". The runtime itself was fine (efficiency wise, not all the other things).
  - Shebanator 7mo ago
    I think Apple is more responsible. One of Flash's chief benefits to the customers who paid the big bucks was that it 'just worked' everywhere. Once Apple stopped supporting Flash on the iPhone, that story was a lot less attractive. The bugs were definitely Adobe's fault: as with most tech companies, they were far more interested in expanding the feature set than they were on fixing the bugs and stabilizing the platform.
    - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
      This is a myth that needs to die. The first iPhone had 128Mb of RAM and a 400Mhz processor and could barely run Safari. If you scrolled to fast you would get a checkerbox while Safari was trying to catch up. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1732478 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1732478 If it couldn’t run Safari with decent performance, how was it going to run Safari + Flash? In fact when Flash finally did come to Android in 2010, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM and it barely ran then and killed the battery. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011. Another anecdote is that the Motorola Xoom was supposed to to be the “iPad killer” because it could show you the “real web” with Flash. But it came out without Flash because Adobe was late. You couldn’t even see the Xoom home page on the Xoom when it was first introduced because it required Flash.
HanClinto 7mo ago
> .fla / XFL import — This is the one I’m most proud of. You can open your old Flash files. As far as I know, this is the only open-source tool that functions as a full authoring environment and can actually import .fla files. Not just play them back — edit them. The backwards compatibility here is pretty clutch. I agree -- if he can build something that is compatible with old files AND pushes things forward for new, then this could do some really awesome stuff.
- adrian17 7mo ago
  AFAIK the .fla format was never fully documented or reverse engineered by anyone (FFDEC has an exporter, but not importer), so this alone would be a bold claim.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - samsartor 7mo ago
    https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ is pretty solid
    - adrian17 7mo ago
      I'm talking about the .fla (XFL) format, not .swf (which is documented well - though that doesn't mean its exact behavior its understood well) (note: I'm one of Ruffle's maintainers)
    - Cr8 7mo ago
      ruffle is a player for the output format (swf), .fla is the authoring format
- gs17 7mo ago
  I'm very curious if the "ActionScript-to-C# transpiler" will actually work as well as he's hoping.
  - 7mo ago
AndrewDucker 7mo ago
This doesn't make it clear how people will run the end products. Is it targeting the web? If not then it's not going to be useful for the same things as Flash was.
- adampunk 7mo ago
  Call me crazy, but I think the folks at newgrounds will figure out what to do with this new flash.
  - nacs 7mo ago
    They may but note that this isn't an official Newgrounds project - this is just a user ("Bill") posting on his own Newgrounds blog that he has made this (its not Newgrounds' official blog).
    - adampunk 7mo ago
      I meant Newgrounds the community.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- hendersonreed 7mo ago
  It says: > HTML5/Canvas export — Export to self-contained HTML5 with JavaScript Canvas 2D playback.
  - AndrewDucker 7mo ago
    Thank you, I missed that. Excellent news!
- lbourdages 7mo ago
  Apart from the HTML5 export mentioned by another commenter, there exists Ruffle[1], a Rust + WASM reimplementation of Flash that can play swf files. It's used a lot on archive.org or on some websites like https://homestarrunner.com https://homestarrunner.com. [1] https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/
cableshaft 7mo ago
I made Flash Games back in the day. Here's my old profile on Newgrounds: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/ https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/ One thing Flash had that nothing else has really seemed to replicate as well since, is an environment that both coders and artists could use. I'd collaborate with an artist, they'd make their animations within an FLA, send it to me, and then I'd copy+paste into the project file, and it'd just work. I could even tweak their animations if need be to remove a frame here or there to tighten the animations and make it feel more fluid, etc. That being said, I'm not sure I could go back to it now. I've been working with Love2D lately, and I prefer that (especially for the version control). FLA version control was always me going 'GameName-1.fla', 'GameName-2.fla', or when I got a little smarter 'GameName-Date.fla'. Eventually they let you split out the actionscript files into its own files, and that was better for version control, but you still had the binary mess of the FLA file. But all these sprite-based game editors just can't handle the crazy intricate animations that vector-based Flash games could handle. Porting one of my old games (Clock Legends) that had hundreds of frames of hand drawn animation for a boss that filled the screen would be ridiculously huge nowadays, but the FLA for that was like 23MB, I believe (I'll need to hunt it down, I have it somewhere), and several MB of that were for the songs in the game. Excited for this project though. It deserves to come back in some form.
- nosrepa 7mo ago
  Thank you for reminding me of the Clock Crew. The Internet used to be fun.
  - fuzzy_biscuit 7mo ago
    Strawberry Clock is our king!
    - barbs 7mo ago
      B
    - Dwedit 7mo ago
      I was in some instant-message conversations (Romhacking related I think) with CoolBoyMan before he told me that he was Strawberry Clock.
alhazrod 7mo ago
I wish Adobe had open sourced Flash - it really was a pretty amazing tool. They could have owned the proprietary developer tool market to support themselves...
- Dwedit 7mo ago
  Adobe open-sourced the ActionScript 3 interpreter way back in 2006.
- cube00 7mo ago
  They couldn't because it lives on in Adobe Animate which Disney as a customer among others.
  - egypturnash 7mo ago
    Which they have recently said they will be dropping all support for: https://community.adobe.com/announcements-539/adobe-animate-end-of-life-and-support-timeline-1548220 https://community.adobe.com/announcements-539/adobe-animate-... A lot of people - including studios who use it for projects that can take years to complete - were very unhappy at the prospect of having the only tool that can read their mountains of FLA files (the file format the Flash/Animate editor uses, and used to compile into a SWF) stop working because Adobe turned off the auth servers. Adobe has pulled back to "okay we're, uh, putting it in maintenance mode, expect no new features, ever, just security patches".
    - PaulDavisThe1st 7mo ago
      A lot of people made the choice to use proprietary tools for their creative work flow, rather than making do with and pushing for better open source equivalents. I have some sympathy for them - I am sure they felt it was the only real choice at the time - but not a whole lot.
      - egypturnash 7mo ago
        There were zero open-source options at the time. Flash/Animate was the only digital ink-n-paint solution that was even vaguely affordable to the hobbyist or small studio for many years. Most studio-quality 2D programs were proprietary solutions developed in big studios like Disney. People started using Flash for professional work around 1995. "Open source" barely existed as a concept then, Wikipedia tells me the name "open source" was coined in 1998 and it took a while before anyone but programmers gave even half a damn about it. The first open-source studio-quality 2D animation package I know of was OpenToonz from 2016, which was a relicensing of a commercial package that dates back to the late eighties or the early nineties - Wikipedia just mentions v3 from 1993. But anyway now there is a dude working on an open-source Flash clone that can read the editor source files, so all these people you have next to no sympathy for have something to celebrate.
LoganDark 7mo ago
Article title could use capitalizing Flash -- I thought it was about NAND at first.
- Computer0 7mo ago
  I thought it was a camera accessory.
  - recursive 7mo ago
    I thought it was about inappropriate exposure in public while wearing a trenchcoat.
- dmd 7mo ago
  God forbid anyone read past the title.
  - LoganDark 7mo ago
    I made the comment because, I did?
- functionmouse 7mo ago
  also thought it was NAND
agumonkey 7mo ago
I wonder how much this would impact the react world
- graypegg 7mo ago
  I don't think a modern flash would come after web app UI in the same way it once did. The niche this would fill would be in web games/interactive media I think.
noelfranthomas 7mo ago
Don't know much about this space, just curious why build this when we have Rive, Spline, etc?
- egypturnash 7mo ago
  Approximately a quarter century of editor UI muscle memory in everyone who's used Flash/Animate professionally. And a quarter century of people being used to the precise quirks of how Flash/Animate organizes the parts for a cartoon. And a quarter century of source files in a private format that can only be read and understood by Flash/Animate.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 7mo ago
    Who has authored anything they actually cared about using Flash in the last 15 years? I don't know Animate - is it basically Flash Updated (I've read here that Adobe kept some elements of Flash in Animate, but it is unclear what). Also, there are non-Flash players for .fla files (not editors, however).
    - egypturnash 7mo ago
      Animation studios. I know for a fact that Teen Titans was animated in Flash/Animate for its entire life, for instance; that’s directly from a former co-worker who was the animation director there. Lots of small productions, too. Animate is a lot cheaper than Toon Boom Harmony so tons of hobbyists use it. The only difference between Animate and Flash is that SWF export got dropped eventually. And a haphazard smattering of new features got added. You don’t play FLAs. You load them into the editor and output SWFs. Or various video formats. There are reverse engineered SWF players, most prominently Ruffle, but this is the first I’ve heard of anyone parsing FLA files. FLA is the source format, it is to a SWF (or other video file exported from the editor) as a PSD is to a JPEG, or a .c file to an executable program compiled with all debug info off.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 7mo ago
alcover 7mo ago
May the Gods be with him. The nostalgia is very strong. Opening Flash and start a new project was an immense source of joy to me in the 00's.
graypegg 7mo ago
Exciting! But I can't seem to find any where I can take a peek. It looks like a lot of UI is at least there, and the post makes some big promises about what's already done. The vector icons in the side bar have the distinct cruft of LLM-generated SVGs, so just ideally hoping it isn't a quickly-made UI shell. The big claims about .fla import make me a bit skeptical. Though even so, we're not owed anything and I think it's a cool idea to share!
random3 7mo ago
I built a flash crawler to index all Flash while at Adobe. It started with Alexa top 1M I think then crawled. This was 2008-2010 I think so we had to do a lot of custom stuff, but we basically crawled then ran a headless Firefox with a custom headless Flash player that dumped a ton of data so also analyzed every flash at runtime and indexed all of that. We built a dedicated cluster in a colocation center in Bucharest to handle all of this. Had issues with max floor weights and what not. Then had to upgrade the RAM on on the cluster. No remote hands. Every operation was a trip to a really cold place. Used a lot of early stage stuff like Nutch, Hadoop, HBase etc. Everything was then processed and dumped to an SQL database with a nice UI on top. It took a few weeks to set it up, then we passed it to a team of interns that built the SQL database and UI on top. They learned a ton of stuff. Some are now in the Bay Area. The tool uncovered a ton of security issues. It was fun building it. I wonder if Adobe kept the data. It could be useful and/or good donation for the Computer History Museum.
- mmooss 7mo ago
  Very interesting. What was the objective?
  - random3 7mo ago
    This was around when we were trying to get Flash to work on the first iPhone, so we had a hackathon for a week. Since I was a distributed systems "hacker", I ended up doing what was needed :) and there were lots of questions related to the sizing of flash on web pages and what not. That's what started it - I simple python script that I refined during the hackathon to get the embed parameters etc. But once I started processing the data, it became a thing and we made a small cross-team team to get this going. We eventually expanded the effort in a few different directions and wanted to do a Flash analytics, but ended up with the internal tool only due to privacy concerns.
    - fenomas 7mo ago
      I remember using that tool internally! Personally I think I only used it to get stats of which features/APIs were popular. But I think other teams used it for QA/conformance, like finding content that occurred in the wild but wasn't covered by test cases.
999900000999 7mo ago
Unless this is open source I don't see the point. We can't trust closed source software for content creation tools. What happens when he gets bored? However, I LOVE C# and would totally be down to contribute if it's open source.
- grimgrin 7mo ago
  ".fla / XFL import — This is the one I’m most proud of. You can open your old Flash files. As far as I know, this is the only open-source tool that functions as a full authoring environment and can actually import .fla files. Not just play them back — edit them." as to when they share the source, idk!
  - 999900000999 7mo ago
    Great. I'd feel better if he had some other core contributors, but this is a great start.
cynicalsecurity 7mo ago
I feel young again.
mock-possum 7mo ago
I just noticed in a dev stream for Cult Of The Lamb that they were using .fla files, what a throwback. I remember those days well!
- Dwedit 7mo ago
  Mewgenics had assets created using Flash.
immy 7mo ago
Hype (YC W11) is for animators to produce HTML5 https://tumult.com/hype/ https://tumult.com/hype/
whywhywhywhy 7mo ago
Think in this day and age starting your project off saying it's open source but making sure to open the patreon first and take money before the repo is a bad start when the reason for the project existing is a closed source paid product is being discontinued. Especially if the dev is working on a sound editor, something Flash doesn't actually need before even having an outputted example up and running or even a video of it working.
- K0balt 7mo ago
  Hmm.
- lukan 7mo ago
  Having an integrated sound editor does sound like a nice to have feature, but I also would be rather interested in a working example.
Retr0id 7mo ago
It's impressive what people are able to vibecode these days!
- latexr 7mo ago
  There’s no mention of any vibe coding in the post. Believe it or not, there are people who are still able to program by themselves.
  - GaggiX 7mo ago
    I'm not the parent comment but if you look at the images they posted you can see that the icons of the tools seems very likely to have been generated by a LLM (the SVGs).
    - latexr 7mo ago
      > the icons of the tools seems very likely to have been generated by a LLM They just look like bad rushed placeholder icons. And why does that immediately scream vibe-coded?
      - GaggiX 7mo ago
        They have the same same inconsistencies and incoherencies that I have encounter with LLMs creating SVG. Very different from what a human would have created (and I don't think you have to train your eyes to see it).
      - Retr0id 7mo ago
        Humans tend to use free icon collections or search the web for suitable images, rather than hand-writing SVG markup.
        foresto 7mo ago
        Why even consider hand-written SVG when drawing tools like Inkscape exist? Sure, there are occasions to write markup from scratch, but vanishingly few in my experience.
ellg 7mo ago
Whats the key difference between this and Rive? Especially now that Rive has full scripting support? Just curious more than anything, this does seem neat, especially the fla / xfl support (although for new things this doesnt seem like a huge killer feature)
markstos 7mo ago
But will there be a browser plugin?
- Dwedit 7mo ago
  There is the Ruffle browser extension which will restore Flash functionality to very old websites.
spondyl 7mo ago
This post raises a few flags in my mind that it was at least partly generated by an LLM? That isn't to suggest that this editor doesn't/won't exist, that the editor uses LLM-generated code (which is not a sleight) or that the claims are not truthful. The main things that jump out are the inconsistency in writing style (sometimes doing all lowercase and no punctuation) but then the brief rundown is all perfect spelling and grammar with em-dashes. The "Not just" parts stick out like "Not just play them back — edit them" as well as "This isn’t a proof of concept or a weekend project. It’s a real authoring environment." Anyway, best of luck to the author with their project!
- GaggiX 7mo ago
  >That isn't to suggest that this editor doesn't/won't exist, that the editor uses LLM-generated code (which is not a sleight) or that the claims are not truthful. If you look at the icons of the tools in the image they appear to have been generated using a LLM. So yeah it's probably vibecoded a lot, it would be cool if the author reports how much and how it was used but I don't think newgrounds would like it much.
- sneak 7mo ago
  https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/prompts/src/branch/main/prompts/LLM_PROSE_TELLS.md https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/prompts/src/branch/main/prompts/LL...
  - roywiggins 7mo ago
    > This document has been through ten editing passes and it still has tells in it. The big one it missed: the headers are mostly "The [Noun:0.9|Adjective:0.1] [Noun]". LLMs (maybe just Claude?) love these. Every heading sounds like it could be a Robert Ludlum novel (The Listicle Instinct, The Empathy Performance, The Prometheus Deception).
  - zahlman 7mo ago
    Huh. This page claims "This website requires JavaScript." at the top, yet I can read everything fine. TFA on the other hand is blank without JavaScript.
IvanK_net 7mo ago
In 2012, I created IvanK.js - a Javascript library with the "Flash API" for quickly remaking ActionScript 3 games into the web environment. But it required WebGL, which as not very well supported back then. I could remake several of my flash games quickly into web. https://lib.ivank.net/?p=demos&d=bitmaps https://lib.ivank.net/?p=demos&d=bitmaps
- lukan 7mo ago
  I used it, thanks for making it. (Did not released something with it, though) I switched to EaselJS, as this was supposedly the official supported libary of Adobe Animate, but then later settled with pixijs.
jezzamon 7mo ago
Seems fun, I would've loved for this to be a web app though. Given flash is so tied to the web, it would be fitting if the editor itself worked like that
01100011 7mo ago
I know very little about this space, but wasn't Haxe(https://haxe.org/ https://haxe.org/) supposed to be a sort of next-gen, modern Flash replacement?
- benoau 7mo ago
  Haxe provides a similar syntax to ActionScript, but it was OpenFL built on top of Haxe that provided similar APIs. https://www.openfl.org/ https://www.openfl.org/
- gs17 7mo ago
  That's more of an ActionScript replacement if anything. What made Flash great to use was the combination of a good art/animation tool with scripting support in an easy to use package that exports to a format anyone can (well, could) run fairly consistently in their browser. I don't think a lot of people miss AS3 without the rest of the tooling.
- Brajeshwar 7mo ago
  Yes, not the Flash IDE per se, but an ActionScript Editor/Compiler. Nicolas from motiontwin.com released a tool called MTASC, which later gave birth to HAXE.
- Dwedit 7mo ago
  Notably, Dead Cells was made using Haxe.
pushedx 7mo ago
Every so often over the past 15 years I've had this exact thought, "The world needs something which is exactly like flash. Not kind of like flash, exactly like flash." A whole generation of people learned how to create art, games, music, animations, using flash, and the same kind of tool hasn't existed since then. I think Minecraft and Roblox replaced flash for the new generations.
- tombert 7mo ago
  I agree, I love Flash more than nearly any other piece of software that has ever been on the computer, and it's one of the few things I miss about moving to Linux away from Windows. I can still run Flash MX 2004 via Wine and play with that there, so it's not "lost media" or anything, but what I want is something as close to Flash as possible, that runs on Linux, and gets regular updates, and that doesn't require I subscribe to it for forever. I have a perpetual license to ToonBoom (that I bought when they were still doing perpetual licenses), and ToonBoom is very cool software, but it's purely an animation software. I also have a license to Scirra Construct 2, and that's pretty neat as well, but in my mind that's basically a game engine. Flash was this cool, weird hybrid of both a game engine and artistic software that I haven't found a good replacement for. With Flash, you could make a cartoon without touching ActionScript. It was designed around animation. If you wanted to extend the cartoon you could then add code, piecemeal, and if you wanted to make a full game then you could make a full game. It was great.
- tsumnia 7mo ago
  > I think Minecraft and Roblox replaced flash for the new generations. I think this is the biggest shift. Minecraft starting out as a .jar file allowed for reverse engineering and modding support became a huge part of its "culture". Coupled with artists focusing on spritesheets, you got to have that same Newgrounds online underground scene but for the next generation of kids. Roblox is takes a similar place now that Minecraft is ~15 years old and all "grown up". Maybe once Roblox hits that similar fate this new Flash will be ready to fill its shoes.
tombert 7mo ago
Heck yeah. I've said it a million times, but I stand by Flash being the most fun development environment ever made. Being able to draw your cartoons, make them a movie clip, export to code, edit things around without having to re-count all the frames, built in hit-detection, etc. It's a blast to write software for Flash, and I am not sure I've ever had more fun than being a teenager developing Flash games in my bedroom with a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004 Pro (or was it Flash 8? I can't remember). Now, I'll admit that part of that was because I was a teenager at the time, and programming was still a cool novel thing to me, but I do think that the platform was uniquely fun and interactive, and I have been chasing that high for awhile without being able to find something to fully replace it. Stuff like Construct and GameMaker and stuff are pretty cool and fun, but they still don't really hit the same for me that Flash did. If we can have a new Flash, I will be very happy.
- moolcool 7mo ago
  I think it's taken for granted just how good flash was. It gets hated on a lot because it was proprietary and insecure, but it's really impressive that they had a system where teenagers could make genuinely good games and animations, and then play them in web browsers on machines with Pentium IIs. There's nothing else like that today.
  - tombert 7mo ago
    I think Adobe should have open-sourced the Flash player like 20 years ago. If they had done that, then it could have been incorporated into the web standards (or at least something somewhat inspired by it). Instead it took like 10+ years for web standards to catch up, Flash Player got crappier and crappier and eventually murdered in 2020. If they had FOSS'd it, Adobe could still be the de facto leader of web-authoring tech.
    - odo1242 7mo ago
      There would still be the security issues, but yea this is still true
bouncyhat 7mo ago
It makes me so happy to see this. When I was in high school Flash was THE way that you could practice programming games with the instant feedback of graphics animation, key input, and playing sound. I enjoyed it so much that out of college I joined the Adobe Platform team right around 2008. I worked in the SF office which was formerly the Macromedia HQ before Adobe bought them out. There were some really cool Flash tools in the works around then. Some internal developers had gotten some version of Flash Alchemy to run Doom in the browser. There was a lot of work going on to add proper GPU integration into the platform. I got to see some cool prototypes. Ultimately though, my timing was poor. This was right around when Steve Jobs decided that the iPhone shouldn't run Flash. The internal lore/rumor mill was that some PM had missed Steve Jobs reporting crashes in Safari enough times that Jobs was just DONE with Flash and had decided to kill it on his platform. I have no idea how true that was. There was a mad scramble at Adobe to try to figure out how to keep Flash running on the iPhone. The AIR team was actively looking into reverse engineering solutions so they could essentially deploy Flash apps that didn't look like they were written in Flash. They tried to rally the community with a "We <3 Flash" campaign. It didn't matter. Flash was taken off the iPhone and Adobe made the call to give up. In 2009 after a few waves of 2008 recession cuts they slashed a huge part of the platform team and I knew it was over. There were a lot of reasons that Flash probably needed to go, but I wonder about what the web would have been if it hadn't been killed around that time. Regardless I hope this project succeeds. <3 Flash.
- bsimpson 7mo ago
  The first time I saw Bret Victor speak was at a FlashCamp at that office! Went to some really cool talks there. Also shipped my only Android game as an AIR app. I will forever be one of Flash's defenders. Was the best digital creative tool I ever encountered.
agnishom 7mo ago
I hope there is a feature that will let people export the artefacts to HTML5/JS.
purplejacket 7mo ago
Sorry, but can someone explain to me why Flash failed? Was it because Apple killed it, or other reasons? Because not open source? Too heavy? I never really got the story, or only got bits and pieces. I know a lot of people liked Flash.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47257159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47257159
tw04 7mo ago
It's not flash until it supports homestar runner.
phendrenad2 7mo ago
If this ships, it'll fulfill the "editor" piece of the flash equation. We're still missing the "runtime" though (if we want that old flash feeling). We'll probably need to strongarm Google into supporting it in Chrome, but that's not impossible (especially with AI-enabled coding eroding Google's moat).
- gs17 7mo ago
  He's promising both HTML5 and SWF export, I don't think we really need a new "runtime". Ruffle is pretty close to full AVM2 support.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
Brajeshwar 7mo ago
I personally believe that Flash has had its day and should die a Hero, rather than be resurrected to become a villain. For being open-sourced, it was a pretty hot topic, especially at an interesting gathering inside Macromedia in the summer of 2005. Little did we know (or kinda) that it was going to take a different path with Adobe that Christmas. Honestly, I think, Flash kinda died way before the iPhone was released.
- squidbeak 7mo ago
  That different path was grim. Adobe wrecked or killed a lot of really good software after the buyout. Freehand and Fireworks were incredible for their day.
  - paradox460 7mo ago
    I still can't find anything quite as good for web authoring as fireworks.
outlore 7mo ago
For someone like me who never got the opportunity to play with Flash, what are some modern equivalents? Is it Rive or Three.js? Or even Godot Web?
- lukan 7mo ago
  Rive is closest sonce they have scripring support. Threejs is a 3D graphic libary, something different. And godot web I never used but know of as a game engine, not a scriptable animation tool.
  - Pfeil 7mo ago
    As Godot is still very simple from the UX perspective, I'd prefer a set of tools to fully replicate the flash workflow instead of a dedicated app. Why reinvent the wheel? Stuff like keyframe animation editor etc is already there anyway and the engine is powerful enough. Just missing some tools, which could be easily added via the asset store.
socalgal2 7mo ago
I get that Flash hit a sweet spot. I'm not sure I get why nothing has really replaced it. There are other apps that give you animated vector graphics, in an IDE, with coding. Here's 2? https://rive.app/editor https://rive.app/editor https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/ https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/ I believe Unity doesn't do flash style vector animations. It will take in SVGs, turn them into meshes and apply skeletons. That said, it has replaced Flash in turns of the 1000s and 1000s of web games made with it. https://poki.com/en/unity https://poki.com/en/unity https://itch.io/games/platform-web https://itch.io/games/platform-web (majorty are Unity?) Fun history: There was a flash like (vector animation program) for the Apple II called Fantavision. https://youtu.be/8_Bm8bidrpE?t=40 https://youtu.be/8_Bm8bidrpE?t=40 It would export executables IIRC.
- emi2k01 7mo ago
  I tried Rive Editor and I could not export my animation unless I upgraded to a paid plan, not even to a proprietary format. The free plan is is just a demo with no real world usage, not even for hobby. A bit mad because I spent more time playing with it than I would like to admit
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  All of those alternatives fail at debugging, because to this day browser teams don't consider 2D and 3D debugging tools something worthwhile having on developer tooling. So in some cases you need a native build to try to replicate browser issues, and then being able to plug into RenderDoc, Instruments, PIX,.... Flash had the tools.
  - frou_dh 7mo ago
    Safari's devtools has a visual <canvas> debugger. I remember using it, seeing all the CanvasRenderingContext2D calls that affected the canvas listed, and scrubbing left and right through time to see how a frame was built up.
    - pjmlp 7mo ago
      Thanks for the heads up, at least that is something.
deleted 7mo ago
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intellix 7mo ago
I think Rive is quickly becoming a good Flash replacement. They started with vector animation and timelines and then started adding components and coding etc.
Dectanable 7mo ago
This is exactly the Ardour model (and what Aseprite did before their license change). It's a highly viable way to sustain a niche FOSS desktop app in 2026. Make the repo open source, but put a price tag on the official, signed binaries on the main website. The professionals who need this to get work done will gladly pay a fee to avoid spending an afternoon fighting with Avalonia dependencies and build environments. The starving students and FOSS purists can clone the repo and run the build scripts themselves.
- hu3 7mo ago
  Isn't it dangerous to give up all the code of a commercial software in the age of LLM? Competition can clone the project in another language and lipstick it to look different.
  - Dectanable 7mo ago
    I suspect this overestimates the value of raw code. Anyone can use an LLM to reskin a project but they can't use it to replicate the trust that's built over time. The moment someone forks the code, they inherit a massive maintenance burden. They have to manually verify every change or risk shipping broken garbage. Most professionals will gladly pay a premium for a signed binary from a trusted maintainer rather than risk their workflow on a cut rate clone. The real moat is not the source itself but the reputation. Setting the right price point is the actual challenge. You have to find that sweet spot where the price is high enough to fund development but low enough that the friction of paying is less than the friction of cloning the repo and building it yourself. If you price it like a corporate seat then people will fork it out of spite. The goal is to make the official binary the path of least resistance.
luxuryballs 7mo ago
Now THIS is Claude Maxing! /anakin-podracer-meme
pjmlp 7mo ago
This is a very great idea, Flash authoring was gold, and we already had a class of games in 2010, that 16 years later WebGL/WebGPU still fail to repeat, in available games and development tools.
Piraty 7mo ago
there is electron already. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14087381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14087381
ivanjermakov 7mo ago
New Flash that can't run in the browser?
ccppurcell 7mo ago
The creativity and range of newgrounds content was mind blowing. The focus on fun as opposed to money making was really clear to me even as a kid. I've always had this little conspiracy theory that they killed flash because it was a threat, too easy for us to make our own culture and fun without a wealth extraction step in the middle. I know it's not true but it's just a weird little feeling I have.
theanonymousone 7mo ago
Isn't that Flutter, i.e. an exotic language plus skipping DOM and drawing into a canvas?
- gs17 7mo ago
  No, when people say they miss "Flash", they mostly mean the editor.
- bsimpson 7mo ago
  Flutter's authoring environment is a text editor. This is rebuilding the Flash authoring environment. They are not the same. Nobody would author a kid's TV show in Flutter.
SonnyTark 7mo ago
I thought about doing this for a while, I was a Flash gamedev as an indie then professionally. Back then, once Flash projects start to scale up to get more commercial/competitive, the flash editor is no longer as useful for development and transforms to an assets creation platform that outputs loadable SWF files. The code moves to use Air/Flex SDKs which were more or less equivalent to the tooling we nowadays get with Go/dotnet etc. So while Flash was an amazing expression tool for learners/hobbyists and is amazing for gamejams since assets creation is part of the workflow, it did hold devs back at higher levels of production. Many Flash devs moved to Haxe to continue creating on that platform and it managed to survive and thrive.
vishnuharidas 7mo ago
There were many study materials that were made in Flash that came back alive with the help of Ruffle. Here's my fav list: https://astro.unl.edu/animationsLinks.html https://astro.unl.edu/animationsLinks.html
kriro 7mo ago
I never developed with Flash but my understanding is that "modern web" can do everything Flash was used for. So my understanding is that most useful thing is probably the .fla importer. Wouldn't it make sense to focus on authoring-tooling (animator+developer coop) and the importer but "export" to standard web tech?
- LeratoAustini 7mo ago
  Often in these threads people say that thing does exist (Adobe Animate) and it's all fine, prblmslvd. Rarely are those people who themselves used Flash extensively (although some probably exist). There's something missing though, something went wrong in the transition from Flash to Animate. Part of the beauty of working with Flash, at least as a newcomer or someone who leaned more towards graphics/animation than code, came down to a couple of main points: - Code was *inside* MovieClips (in Flash [almost] everything was a MovieClip, basically a timeline of frames). Code was attached to frames. When the playhead entered the frame, the script would run. Some of us who started as designers later leaned heavily into the code, but even those who were more comfortable sticking to the visual side of things would end up with a little grab bag full of scripts/snippets that they could just copy/paste into a frame and tweak without getting too bogged down with code. Even at a very simple level (if somethingsomething jump to frame 20, else loop back to frame one) this added a dimension of control and interactivity. Crucially, it was implemented well and very simple to understand. - Everything was nested. MovieClips within MovieClips. Timelines within timelines. Simple behaviours could be stacked up and lead to natural-feeling complexity just due to this nesting. Of course these things can be implemented today too, and other tools have and do implement versions of them. But there are often just 1 or 2 levels of abstraction too much, enough to put off some kinds of minds, or people at certain levels of experience. The thing about the Flash experience was that it all felt so fluid and intuitive. Direct. Learning it was fun. Animate (as far as I remember) did keep those paradigms I mentioned. The timelines were still there, the drawing/animation tools too. But something somehow goes wrong in the translation to modern web tech. If it didn't, people would have just carried on using Flash, outputting JS/HTML instead of SWFs and nobody would have noticed. A lot of the above is testament to Macromedia and linked to their other software, Director (similar to Flash but aimed more at desktop and 'interactive CDs'). They made software that was a joy to use. To give them their dues, Adobe pushed it further. Also their market dominance meant if you wanted to get into this web stuff and make cool things, Flash was *the* (only, really) way to do it. Which makes me think it may have been a time and place thing, which we won't get back. The modern web and range of options maybe makes it too diffuse, harder for something new to catch on. I hope I'm wrong. As others have said here though, maybe stuff like MineCraft and Roblox are filling a similar conceptual gap for different generations and I'm just old and nostalgic.
DonHopkins 7mo ago
Marc Canter (founder of MacroMind/MacroMedia) one explained to me something revealing about the Director timeline (their original product before Flash, later integrated with the web browser as Shockwave): It's essentially just a BASIC program rotated 90 degrees on its side, full of GOTOs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35652164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35652164 DonHopkins on April 21, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2... I love all the amazing inspirational open source examples of generative procedural art and artificial life that Jared Tarbell published on his web site https://web.archive.org/web/20070202025610/http://levitated.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070202025610/http://levitated.... . It opened my eyes to using Flash for procedural graphics and simulations, instead of just using timelines like a glorified graphical player piano, or like a BASIC program full of GOTO spaghetti rotated 90 degrees counter clockwise (which is how Macromedia founder Marc Canter described Director's Lingo, which also used frame numbers like BASIC line numbers). Jared went on to do a lot more amazing stuff in Processing, co-founded Etsy, and built a toy factory! https://www.artnome.com/news/2020/8/24/interview-with-generative-artist-jared-tarbell https://www.artnome.com/news/2020/8/24/interview-with-genera... https://www.artnome.com/news/2018/8/8/why-love-generative-art https://www.artnome.com/news/2018/8/8/why-love-generative-ar... https://beyondtellerrand.com/events/dusseldorf-2018/speakers/jared-tarbell https://beyondtellerrand.com/events/dusseldorf-2018/speakers... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_-9UWkgDf8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_-9UWkgDf8
phplovesong 7mo ago
Haxe used to be the goto for Flash development. Maybe it could benefit a project like this too. I assume the target is AS5?
thenthenthen 7mo ago
Sadly the website is blocking me and also my vpn and also my 5g :(
deleted 7mo ago
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pmarreck 7mo ago
The first time I tried VideoWorks (which is what Flash was based on) on an early Macintosh was magical.
redenter 7mo ago
Sometimes I give presentations about how awesome the browser is. And everytime it reminds of all the capabilities we had back in the time. Easy animations, sound, 3D, augmented reality. Yea, we've got HTML5. But it took years to even come close to what we could do with Flash and Actionscript. Let alone how easy it was to create super cool animations.
JKCalhoun 7mo ago
I apologize, I have spent all of about one minute considering this—but I would think Flash for 2026 might simply be a wrapper for HTML5, Canvas. Likely there is already a Javascript library out there that closely fits the bill.
- KaiserPro 7mo ago
  flash player, yeah. the IDE, not really. IF it were that easy, someone would have done it, because the flash IDE was a bit like vim, but for a wierd mix of visual and coding. Like action script was object object oriented, but also kinda graph based, with time.
  - JKCalhoun 7mo ago
    Thanks.
gethly 7mo ago
with js canvas, i am surprised "flash" has not made a comeback ages ago. maybe it is not flash itself but the concept that it represents that we have passed over already.
RyanOD 7mo ago
Good luck with this project. Very exciting! I used to teach high school computer science classes and we built web pages with this new thing called "CSS" (no more tables!) and games in Flash. Cutting edge work we did. Those were good times.
gaigalas 7mo ago
Synfig though. I know it doesn't export stuff or have interactive SWF things, but its whole 2D backbone is absolutely fantastic.
babypuncher 7mo ago
replacing ActionScript with C# is a big win in my book, I will be watching this project with great interest.
shevy-java 7mo ago
Would be kind of cool. Flash 2.0. Or 10.0. One may say "but but but HTML5!" - but many games or applications that used to exist, are mostly gone (not all but many). Flash was creative. Joecartoon was fun back in those days; the HTML version is kind of ... lifeless compared to it. Granted, a lot of the "old" internet was also different so it is hard to compare.
bsimpson 7mo ago
There's much love given here to Flash as a creative tool and as an on-ramp for UX engineering. Both well-deserved, and both reason-enough to support Bill's project. One aspect that Flash got uniquely right was the ability to push and pull on vectors like clay. It's the only vector editing tool I've ever used that didn't concern you with bezier abstractions and just let you directly manipulate them. I don't know what algorithms were that enabled that, but I hope that's part of this tool too! Curious if C# is the right language for an ActionScript revival. Feels like a strange choice considering ActionScript was the TypeScript of its day, but perhaps the prevalence of Unity now and the ability to share tech with the tool's C# codebase makes it a reasonable decision.
tonnydourado 7mo ago
That's cool and all, but can we pass a law that this can ONLY be used for games? Because I remember the web when flash was everywhere. The games might have been fun, but everything else sucked humongous balls. Let's not get back to that.
michalsustr 7mo ago
This would be great if it compiled to wasm! Rust has great support for it. And you’d get native architecture for free too!
AlienRobot 7mo ago
As much as I want to believe, I think this goes far beyond the ability of a solo developer with a patreon. I do hope it finds some success, though!
romperstomper 7mo ago
Long live the new Flash! :)

741 points by TechPlasma 7mo ago

I remember trying out Macromedia Flash 6.0. My GUI apps were ugly at the time. Learning to build something like I saw in the movies could take years. Then, Flash let me throw together beautiful, animated interfaces like it was nothing. One could do quite a bit after one tutorial. (Note: Quick shoutout to Dreamweaver 6.0 which was a power, WYSIWYG editor. Today, things like Pinegrow might fill the niche.) It's death as a hugely-popular tool was largely due to Apple and Adobe. SaaS model isn't helping it far as wide adoption goes. It also got popular through piracy which hints the replacement should be profitable and widely deployed like open source. I think this might be a good opportunity for a license like PolyForm Non-Commercial. Free users either can't commercialize their content or, like CompCert Compiler, must make the outputs GPL'd (or AGPL'd). The Flash replacement would have a fair, one-time price for unrestricted use with source or you share like they shared with you. What do you all think?

mikepurvis 7mo ago
The "pay to sell your work" model is basically what Autodesk does to provide a version of Fusion that's free/accessible to the hobby 3d printing market while still protecting their b2b revenue. I haven't looked in a while, but I believe there's music and audio production tools with similar approaches.
- sfifs 7mo ago
  More impressively, Da Vinci Resolve is actually free with no restrictions. It is a high end video editor that film makers and professional film studios use (together with hardware and some paid features) from black magic design. Incredibly impressive. Affinity Photo and PhotoPea are also now free without restrictions.
cosmic_cheese 7mo ago
Of the two, I think Adobe is most responsible for the decline of Flash. Even if smartphones had never entered the picture, laptops (where efficiency is important) were quickly becoming the most common form of PC, which would've eventually made Flash as it existed under Adobe untenable as well. The timeline was just accelerated by smartphones. Honestly I can't understand the mental calculus that went on in the heads of Adobe execs at the time. Yes, cleaning up the ball of mud that the Flash codebase had become and making it not so battery hungry wouldn't have been an easy task, but it would've futureproofed it significantly. Instead they decided to keep tacking on new features which ended up being entirely the wrong decision. EDIT: The constant stream of zero-days certainly didn't help things either. A rewrite would've been worthwhile if only to get a handle on that.
- Marazan 7mo ago
  Flash was not particularly battery hungry (My go to example when HTML 5 demos started coming out was rebuilding a HTML 5 demo that was using 100% of 1 core into a flash app that used 5%). The reason it burned CPU cycles is that non-coders could make programs with it and they would produce the world's worst code doing so that "worked". The runtime itself was fine (efficiency wise, not all the other things).
- Shebanator 7mo ago
  I think Apple is more responsible. One of Flash's chief benefits to the customers who paid the big bucks was that it 'just worked' everywhere. Once Apple stopped supporting Flash on the iPhone, that story was a lot less attractive. The bugs were definitely Adobe's fault: as with most tech companies, they were far more interested in expanding the feature set than they were on fixing the bugs and stabilizing the platform.
  - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
    This is a myth that needs to die. The first iPhone had 128Mb of RAM and a 400Mhz processor and could barely run Safari. If you scrolled to fast you would get a checkerbox while Safari was trying to catch up. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1732478 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1732478 If it couldn’t run Safari with decent performance, how was it going to run Safari + Flash? In fact when Flash finally did come to Android in 2010, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM and it barely ran then and killed the battery. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011. Another anecdote is that the Motorola Xoom was supposed to to be the “iPad killer” because it could show you the “real web” with Flash. But it came out without Flash because Adobe was late. You couldn’t even see the Xoom home page on the Xoom when it was first introduced because it required Flash.

HanClinto 7mo ago

> .fla / XFL import — This is the one I’m most proud of. You can open your old Flash files. As far as I know, this is the only open-source tool that functions as a full authoring environment and can actually import .fla files. Not just play them back — edit them. The backwards compatibility here is pretty clutch. I agree -- if he can build something that is compatible with old files AND pushes things forward for new, then this could do some really awesome stuff.

adrian17 7mo ago
AFAIK the .fla format was never fully documented or reverse engineered by anyone (FFDEC has an exporter, but not importer), so this alone would be a bold claim.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- samsartor 7mo ago
  https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ is pretty solid
  - adrian17 7mo ago
    I'm talking about the .fla (XFL) format, not .swf (which is documented well - though that doesn't mean its exact behavior its understood well) (note: I'm one of Ruffle's maintainers)
  - Cr8 7mo ago
    ruffle is a player for the output format (swf), .fla is the authoring format
gs17 7mo ago
I'm very curious if the "ActionScript-to-C# transpiler" will actually work as well as he's hoping.
- 7mo ago

AndrewDucker 7mo ago

This doesn't make it clear how people will run the end products. Is it targeting the web? If not then it's not going to be useful for the same things as Flash was.

adampunk 7mo ago
Call me crazy, but I think the folks at newgrounds will figure out what to do with this new flash.
- nacs 7mo ago
  They may but note that this isn't an official Newgrounds project - this is just a user ("Bill") posting on his own Newgrounds blog that he has made this (its not Newgrounds' official blog).
  - adampunk 7mo ago
    I meant Newgrounds the community.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
hendersonreed 7mo ago
It says: > HTML5/Canvas export — Export to self-contained HTML5 with JavaScript Canvas 2D playback.
- AndrewDucker 7mo ago
  Thank you, I missed that. Excellent news!
lbourdages 7mo ago
Apart from the HTML5 export mentioned by another commenter, there exists Ruffle[1], a Rust + WASM reimplementation of Flash that can play swf files. It's used a lot on archive.org or on some websites like https://homestarrunner.com https://homestarrunner.com. [1] https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/

cableshaft 7mo ago

I made Flash Games back in the day. Here's my old profile on Newgrounds: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/ https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/ One thing Flash had that nothing else has really seemed to replicate as well since, is an environment that both coders and artists could use. I'd collaborate with an artist, they'd make their animations within an FLA, send it to me, and then I'd copy+paste into the project file, and it'd just work. I could even tweak their animations if need be to remove a frame here or there to tighten the animations and make it feel more fluid, etc. That being said, I'm not sure I could go back to it now. I've been working with Love2D lately, and I prefer that (especially for the version control). FLA version control was always me going 'GameName-1.fla', 'GameName-2.fla', or when I got a little smarter 'GameName-Date.fla'. Eventually they let you split out the actionscript files into its own files, and that was better for version control, but you still had the binary mess of the FLA file. But all these sprite-based game editors just can't handle the crazy intricate animations that vector-based Flash games could handle. Porting one of my old games (Clock Legends) that had hundreds of frames of hand drawn animation for a boss that filled the screen would be ridiculously huge nowadays, but the FLA for that was like 23MB, I believe (I'll need to hunt it down, I have it somewhere), and several MB of that were for the songs in the game. Excited for this project though. It deserves to come back in some form.

nosrepa 7mo ago
Thank you for reminding me of the Clock Crew. The Internet used to be fun.
- fuzzy_biscuit 7mo ago
  Strawberry Clock is our king!
  - barbs 7mo ago
    B
  - Dwedit 7mo ago
    I was in some instant-message conversations (Romhacking related I think) with CoolBoyMan before he told me that he was Strawberry Clock.

alhazrod 7mo ago

I wish Adobe had open sourced Flash - it really was a pretty amazing tool. They could have owned the proprietary developer tool market to support themselves...

Dwedit 7mo ago
Adobe open-sourced the ActionScript 3 interpreter way back in 2006.
cube00 7mo ago
They couldn't because it lives on in Adobe Animate which Disney as a customer among others.
- egypturnash 7mo ago
  Which they have recently said they will be dropping all support for: https://community.adobe.com/announcements-539/adobe-animate-end-of-life-and-support-timeline-1548220 https://community.adobe.com/announcements-539/adobe-animate-... A lot of people - including studios who use it for projects that can take years to complete - were very unhappy at the prospect of having the only tool that can read their mountains of FLA files (the file format the Flash/Animate editor uses, and used to compile into a SWF) stop working because Adobe turned off the auth servers. Adobe has pulled back to "okay we're, uh, putting it in maintenance mode, expect no new features, ever, just security patches".
  - PaulDavisThe1st 7mo ago
    A lot of people made the choice to use proprietary tools for their creative work flow, rather than making do with and pushing for better open source equivalents. I have some sympathy for them - I am sure they felt it was the only real choice at the time - but not a whole lot.
    - egypturnash 7mo ago
      There were zero open-source options at the time. Flash/Animate was the only digital ink-n-paint solution that was even vaguely affordable to the hobbyist or small studio for many years. Most studio-quality 2D programs were proprietary solutions developed in big studios like Disney. People started using Flash for professional work around 1995. "Open source" barely existed as a concept then, Wikipedia tells me the name "open source" was coined in 1998 and it took a while before anyone but programmers gave even half a damn about it. The first open-source studio-quality 2D animation package I know of was OpenToonz from 2016, which was a relicensing of a commercial package that dates back to the late eighties or the early nineties - Wikipedia just mentions v3 from 1993. But anyway now there is a dude working on an open-source Flash clone that can read the editor source files, so all these people you have next to no sympathy for have something to celebrate.

LoganDark 7mo ago

Article title could use capitalizing Flash -- I thought it was about NAND at first.

Computer0 7mo ago
I thought it was a camera accessory.
- recursive 7mo ago
  I thought it was about inappropriate exposure in public while wearing a trenchcoat.
dmd 7mo ago
God forbid anyone read past the title.
- LoganDark 7mo ago
  I made the comment because, I did?
functionmouse 7mo ago
also thought it was NAND

agumonkey 7mo ago

I wonder how much this would impact the react world

graypegg 7mo ago
I don't think a modern flash would come after web app UI in the same way it once did. The niche this would fill would be in web games/interactive media I think.

noelfranthomas 7mo ago

Don't know much about this space, just curious why build this when we have Rive, Spline, etc?

egypturnash 7mo ago
Approximately a quarter century of editor UI muscle memory in everyone who's used Flash/Animate professionally. And a quarter century of people being used to the precise quirks of how Flash/Animate organizes the parts for a cartoon. And a quarter century of source files in a private format that can only be read and understood by Flash/Animate.
- PaulDavisThe1st 7mo ago
  Who has authored anything they actually cared about using Flash in the last 15 years? I don't know Animate - is it basically Flash Updated (I've read here that Adobe kept some elements of Flash in Animate, but it is unclear what). Also, there are non-Flash players for .fla files (not editors, however).
  - egypturnash 7mo ago
    Animation studios. I know for a fact that Teen Titans was animated in Flash/Animate for its entire life, for instance; that’s directly from a former co-worker who was the animation director there. Lots of small productions, too. Animate is a lot cheaper than Toon Boom Harmony so tons of hobbyists use it. The only difference between Animate and Flash is that SWF export got dropped eventually. And a haphazard smattering of new features got added. You don’t play FLAs. You load them into the editor and output SWFs. Or various video formats. There are reverse engineered SWF players, most prominently Ruffle, but this is the first I’ve heard of anyone parsing FLA files. FLA is the source format, it is to a SWF (or other video file exported from the editor) as a PSD is to a JPEG, or a .c file to an executable program compiled with all debug info off.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 7mo ago

alcover 7mo ago

May the Gods be with him. The nostalgia is very strong. Opening Flash and start a new project was an immense source of joy to me in the 00's.

graypegg 7mo ago

Exciting! But I can't seem to find any where I can take a peek. It looks like a lot of UI is at least there, and the post makes some big promises about what's already done. The vector icons in the side bar have the distinct cruft of LLM-generated SVGs, so just ideally hoping it isn't a quickly-made UI shell. The big claims about .fla import make me a bit skeptical. Though even so, we're not owed anything and I think it's a cool idea to share!

random3 7mo ago

I built a flash crawler to index all Flash while at Adobe. It started with Alexa top 1M I think then crawled. This was 2008-2010 I think so we had to do a lot of custom stuff, but we basically crawled then ran a headless Firefox with a custom headless Flash player that dumped a ton of data so also analyzed every flash at runtime and indexed all of that. We built a dedicated cluster in a colocation center in Bucharest to handle all of this. Had issues with max floor weights and what not. Then had to upgrade the RAM on on the cluster. No remote hands. Every operation was a trip to a really cold place. Used a lot of early stage stuff like Nutch, Hadoop, HBase etc. Everything was then processed and dumped to an SQL database with a nice UI on top. It took a few weeks to set it up, then we passed it to a team of interns that built the SQL database and UI on top. They learned a ton of stuff. Some are now in the Bay Area. The tool uncovered a ton of security issues. It was fun building it. I wonder if Adobe kept the data. It could be useful and/or good donation for the Computer History Museum.

mmooss 7mo ago
Very interesting. What was the objective?
- random3 7mo ago
  This was around when we were trying to get Flash to work on the first iPhone, so we had a hackathon for a week. Since I was a distributed systems "hacker", I ended up doing what was needed :) and there were lots of questions related to the sizing of flash on web pages and what not. That's what started it - I simple python script that I refined during the hackathon to get the embed parameters etc. But once I started processing the data, it became a thing and we made a small cross-team team to get this going. We eventually expanded the effort in a few different directions and wanted to do a Flash analytics, but ended up with the internal tool only due to privacy concerns.
  - fenomas 7mo ago
    I remember using that tool internally! Personally I think I only used it to get stats of which features/APIs were popular. But I think other teams used it for QA/conformance, like finding content that occurred in the wild but wasn't covered by test cases.

999900000999 7mo ago

Unless this is open source I don't see the point. We can't trust closed source software for content creation tools. What happens when he gets bored? However, I LOVE C# and would totally be down to contribute if it's open source.

grimgrin 7mo ago
".fla / XFL import — This is the one I’m most proud of. You can open your old Flash files. As far as I know, this is the only open-source tool that functions as a full authoring environment and can actually import .fla files. Not just play them back — edit them." as to when they share the source, idk!
- 999900000999 7mo ago
  Great. I'd feel better if he had some other core contributors, but this is a great start.

cynicalsecurity 7mo ago

I feel young again.

mock-possum 7mo ago

I just noticed in a dev stream for Cult Of The Lamb that they were using .fla files, what a throwback. I remember those days well!

Dwedit 7mo ago
Mewgenics had assets created using Flash.

immy 7mo ago

Hype (YC W11) is for animators to produce HTML5 https://tumult.com/hype/ https://tumult.com/hype/

whywhywhywhy 7mo ago

Think in this day and age starting your project off saying it's open source but making sure to open the patreon first and take money before the repo is a bad start when the reason for the project existing is a closed source paid product is being discontinued. Especially if the dev is working on a sound editor, something Flash doesn't actually need before even having an outputted example up and running or even a video of it working.

K0balt 7mo ago
Hmm.
lukan 7mo ago
Having an integrated sound editor does sound like a nice to have feature, but I also would be rather interested in a working example.

Retr0id 7mo ago

It's impressive what people are able to vibecode these days!

latexr 7mo ago
There’s no mention of any vibe coding in the post. Believe it or not, there are people who are still able to program by themselves.
- GaggiX 7mo ago
  I'm not the parent comment but if you look at the images they posted you can see that the icons of the tools seems very likely to have been generated by a LLM (the SVGs).
  - latexr 7mo ago
    > the icons of the tools seems very likely to have been generated by a LLM They just look like bad rushed placeholder icons. And why does that immediately scream vibe-coded?
    - GaggiX 7mo ago
      They have the same same inconsistencies and incoherencies that I have encounter with LLMs creating SVG. Very different from what a human would have created (and I don't think you have to train your eyes to see it).
    - Retr0id 7mo ago
      Humans tend to use free icon collections or search the web for suitable images, rather than hand-writing SVG markup.
      - foresto 7mo ago
        Why even consider hand-written SVG when drawing tools like Inkscape exist? Sure, there are occasions to write markup from scratch, but vanishingly few in my experience.

ellg 7mo ago

Whats the key difference between this and Rive? Especially now that Rive has full scripting support? Just curious more than anything, this does seem neat, especially the fla / xfl support (although for new things this doesnt seem like a huge killer feature)

markstos 7mo ago

But will there be a browser plugin?

Dwedit 7mo ago
There is the Ruffle browser extension which will restore Flash functionality to very old websites.

spondyl 7mo ago

This post raises a few flags in my mind that it was at least partly generated by an LLM? That isn't to suggest that this editor doesn't/won't exist, that the editor uses LLM-generated code (which is not a sleight) or that the claims are not truthful. The main things that jump out are the inconsistency in writing style (sometimes doing all lowercase and no punctuation) but then the brief rundown is all perfect spelling and grammar with em-dashes. The "Not just" parts stick out like "Not just play them back — edit them" as well as "This isn’t a proof of concept or a weekend project. It’s a real authoring environment." Anyway, best of luck to the author with their project!

GaggiX 7mo ago
>That isn't to suggest that this editor doesn't/won't exist, that the editor uses LLM-generated code (which is not a sleight) or that the claims are not truthful. If you look at the icons of the tools in the image they appear to have been generated using a LLM. So yeah it's probably vibecoded a lot, it would be cool if the author reports how much and how it was used but I don't think newgrounds would like it much.
sneak 7mo ago
https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/prompts/src/branch/main/prompts/LLM_PROSE_TELLS.md https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/prompts/src/branch/main/prompts/LL...
- roywiggins 7mo ago
  > This document has been through ten editing passes and it still has tells in it. The big one it missed: the headers are mostly "The [Noun:0.9|Adjective:0.1] [Noun]". LLMs (maybe just Claude?) love these. Every heading sounds like it could be a Robert Ludlum novel (The Listicle Instinct, The Empathy Performance, The Prometheus Deception).
- zahlman 7mo ago
  Huh. This page claims "This website requires JavaScript." at the top, yet I can read everything fine. TFA on the other hand is blank without JavaScript.

IvanK_net 7mo ago

In 2012, I created IvanK.js - a Javascript library with the "Flash API" for quickly remaking ActionScript 3 games into the web environment. But it required WebGL, which as not very well supported back then. I could remake several of my flash games quickly into web. https://lib.ivank.net/?p=demos&d=bitmaps https://lib.ivank.net/?p=demos&d=bitmaps

lukan 7mo ago
I used it, thanks for making it. (Did not released something with it, though) I switched to EaselJS, as this was supposedly the official supported libary of Adobe Animate, but then later settled with pixijs.

jezzamon 7mo ago

Seems fun, I would've loved for this to be a web app though. Given flash is so tied to the web, it would be fitting if the editor itself worked like that

01100011 7mo ago

I know very little about this space, but wasn't Haxe(https://haxe.org/ https://haxe.org/) supposed to be a sort of next-gen, modern Flash replacement?

benoau 7mo ago
Haxe provides a similar syntax to ActionScript, but it was OpenFL built on top of Haxe that provided similar APIs. https://www.openfl.org/ https://www.openfl.org/
gs17 7mo ago
That's more of an ActionScript replacement if anything. What made Flash great to use was the combination of a good art/animation tool with scripting support in an easy to use package that exports to a format anyone can (well, could) run fairly consistently in their browser. I don't think a lot of people miss AS3 without the rest of the tooling.
Brajeshwar 7mo ago
Yes, not the Flash IDE per se, but an ActionScript Editor/Compiler. Nicolas from motiontwin.com released a tool called MTASC, which later gave birth to HAXE.
Dwedit 7mo ago
Notably, Dead Cells was made using Haxe.

pushedx 7mo ago

Every so often over the past 15 years I've had this exact thought, "The world needs something which is exactly like flash. Not kind of like flash, exactly like flash." A whole generation of people learned how to create art, games, music, animations, using flash, and the same kind of tool hasn't existed since then. I think Minecraft and Roblox replaced flash for the new generations.

tombert 7mo ago
I agree, I love Flash more than nearly any other piece of software that has ever been on the computer, and it's one of the few things I miss about moving to Linux away from Windows. I can still run Flash MX 2004 via Wine and play with that there, so it's not "lost media" or anything, but what I want is something as close to Flash as possible, that runs on Linux, and gets regular updates, and that doesn't require I subscribe to it for forever. I have a perpetual license to ToonBoom (that I bought when they were still doing perpetual licenses), and ToonBoom is very cool software, but it's purely an animation software. I also have a license to Scirra Construct 2, and that's pretty neat as well, but in my mind that's basically a game engine. Flash was this cool, weird hybrid of both a game engine and artistic software that I haven't found a good replacement for. With Flash, you could make a cartoon without touching ActionScript. It was designed around animation. If you wanted to extend the cartoon you could then add code, piecemeal, and if you wanted to make a full game then you could make a full game. It was great.
tsumnia 7mo ago
> I think Minecraft and Roblox replaced flash for the new generations. I think this is the biggest shift. Minecraft starting out as a .jar file allowed for reverse engineering and modding support became a huge part of its "culture". Coupled with artists focusing on spritesheets, you got to have that same Newgrounds online underground scene but for the next generation of kids. Roblox is takes a similar place now that Minecraft is ~15 years old and all "grown up". Maybe once Roblox hits that similar fate this new Flash will be ready to fill its shoes.

tombert 7mo ago

Heck yeah. I've said it a million times, but I stand by Flash being the most fun development environment ever made. Being able to draw your cartoons, make them a movie clip, export to code, edit things around without having to re-count all the frames, built in hit-detection, etc. It's a blast to write software for Flash, and I am not sure I've ever had more fun than being a teenager developing Flash games in my bedroom with a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004 Pro (or was it Flash 8? I can't remember). Now, I'll admit that part of that was because I was a teenager at the time, and programming was still a cool novel thing to me, but I do think that the platform was uniquely fun and interactive, and I have been chasing that high for awhile without being able to find something to fully replace it. Stuff like Construct and GameMaker and stuff are pretty cool and fun, but they still don't really hit the same for me that Flash did. If we can have a new Flash, I will be very happy.

moolcool 7mo ago
I think it's taken for granted just how good flash was. It gets hated on a lot because it was proprietary and insecure, but it's really impressive that they had a system where teenagers could make genuinely good games and animations, and then play them in web browsers on machines with Pentium IIs. There's nothing else like that today.
- tombert 7mo ago
  I think Adobe should have open-sourced the Flash player like 20 years ago. If they had done that, then it could have been incorporated into the web standards (or at least something somewhat inspired by it). Instead it took like 10+ years for web standards to catch up, Flash Player got crappier and crappier and eventually murdered in 2020. If they had FOSS'd it, Adobe could still be the de facto leader of web-authoring tech.
  - odo1242 7mo ago
    There would still be the security issues, but yea this is still true

bouncyhat 7mo ago

It makes me so happy to see this. When I was in high school Flash was THE way that you could practice programming games with the instant feedback of graphics animation, key input, and playing sound. I enjoyed it so much that out of college I joined the Adobe Platform team right around 2008. I worked in the SF office which was formerly the Macromedia HQ before Adobe bought them out. There were some really cool Flash tools in the works around then. Some internal developers had gotten some version of Flash Alchemy to run Doom in the browser. There was a lot of work going on to add proper GPU integration into the platform. I got to see some cool prototypes. Ultimately though, my timing was poor. This was right around when Steve Jobs decided that the iPhone shouldn't run Flash. The internal lore/rumor mill was that some PM had missed Steve Jobs reporting crashes in Safari enough times that Jobs was just DONE with Flash and had decided to kill it on his platform. I have no idea how true that was. There was a mad scramble at Adobe to try to figure out how to keep Flash running on the iPhone. The AIR team was actively looking into reverse engineering solutions so they could essentially deploy Flash apps that didn't look like they were written in Flash. They tried to rally the community with a "We <3 Flash" campaign. It didn't matter. Flash was taken off the iPhone and Adobe made the call to give up. In 2009 after a few waves of 2008 recession cuts they slashed a huge part of the platform team and I knew it was over. There were a lot of reasons that Flash probably needed to go, but I wonder about what the web would have been if it hadn't been killed around that time. Regardless I hope this project succeeds. <3 Flash.

bsimpson 7mo ago
The first time I saw Bret Victor speak was at a FlashCamp at that office! Went to some really cool talks there. Also shipped my only Android game as an AIR app. I will forever be one of Flash's defenders. Was the best digital creative tool I ever encountered.

agnishom 7mo ago

I hope there is a feature that will let people export the artefacts to HTML5/JS.

purplejacket 7mo ago

Sorry, but can someone explain to me why Flash failed? Was it because Apple killed it, or other reasons? Because not open source? Too heavy? I never really got the story, or only got bits and pieces. I know a lot of people liked Flash.

raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47257159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47257159

tw04 7mo ago

It's not flash until it supports homestar runner.

phendrenad2 7mo ago

If this ships, it'll fulfill the "editor" piece of the flash equation. We're still missing the "runtime" though (if we want that old flash feeling). We'll probably need to strongarm Google into supporting it in Chrome, but that's not impossible (especially with AI-enabled coding eroding Google's moat).

gs17 7mo ago
He's promising both HTML5 and SWF export, I don't think we really need a new "runtime". Ruffle is pretty close to full AVM2 support.

deleted 7mo ago

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Brajeshwar 7mo ago

I personally believe that Flash has had its day and should die a Hero, rather than be resurrected to become a villain. For being open-sourced, it was a pretty hot topic, especially at an interesting gathering inside Macromedia in the summer of 2005. Little did we know (or kinda) that it was going to take a different path with Adobe that Christmas. Honestly, I think, Flash kinda died way before the iPhone was released.

squidbeak 7mo ago
That different path was grim. Adobe wrecked or killed a lot of really good software after the buyout. Freehand and Fireworks were incredible for their day.
- paradox460 7mo ago
  I still can't find anything quite as good for web authoring as fireworks.

outlore 7mo ago

For someone like me who never got the opportunity to play with Flash, what are some modern equivalents? Is it Rive or Three.js? Or even Godot Web?

lukan 7mo ago
Rive is closest sonce they have scripring support. Threejs is a 3D graphic libary, something different. And godot web I never used but know of as a game engine, not a scriptable animation tool.
- Pfeil 7mo ago
  As Godot is still very simple from the UX perspective, I'd prefer a set of tools to fully replicate the flash workflow instead of a dedicated app. Why reinvent the wheel? Stuff like keyframe animation editor etc is already there anyway and the engine is powerful enough. Just missing some tools, which could be easily added via the asset store.

socalgal2 7mo ago

I get that Flash hit a sweet spot. I'm not sure I get why nothing has really replaced it. There are other apps that give you animated vector graphics, in an IDE, with coding. Here's 2? https://rive.app/editor https://rive.app/editor https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/ https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/ I believe Unity doesn't do flash style vector animations. It will take in SVGs, turn them into meshes and apply skeletons. That said, it has replaced Flash in turns of the 1000s and 1000s of web games made with it. https://poki.com/en/unity https://poki.com/en/unity https://itch.io/games/platform-web https://itch.io/games/platform-web (majorty are Unity?) Fun history: There was a flash like (vector animation program) for the Apple II called Fantavision. https://youtu.be/8_Bm8bidrpE?t=40 https://youtu.be/8_Bm8bidrpE?t=40 It would export executables IIRC.

emi2k01 7mo ago
I tried Rive Editor and I could not export my animation unless I upgraded to a paid plan, not even to a proprietary format. The free plan is is just a demo with no real world usage, not even for hobby. A bit mad because I spent more time playing with it than I would like to admit
pjmlp 7mo ago
All of those alternatives fail at debugging, because to this day browser teams don't consider 2D and 3D debugging tools something worthwhile having on developer tooling. So in some cases you need a native build to try to replicate browser issues, and then being able to plug into RenderDoc, Instruments, PIX,.... Flash had the tools.
- frou_dh 7mo ago
  Safari's devtools has a visual <canvas> debugger. I remember using it, seeing all the CanvasRenderingContext2D calls that affected the canvas listed, and scrubbing left and right through time to see how a frame was built up.
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    Thanks for the heads up, at least that is something.

deleted 7mo ago

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intellix 7mo ago

I think Rive is quickly becoming a good Flash replacement. They started with vector animation and timelines and then started adding components and coding etc.

Dectanable 7mo ago

This is exactly the Ardour model (and what Aseprite did before their license change). It's a highly viable way to sustain a niche FOSS desktop app in 2026. Make the repo open source, but put a price tag on the official, signed binaries on the main website. The professionals who need this to get work done will gladly pay a fee to avoid spending an afternoon fighting with Avalonia dependencies and build environments. The starving students and FOSS purists can clone the repo and run the build scripts themselves.

hu3 7mo ago
Isn't it dangerous to give up all the code of a commercial software in the age of LLM? Competition can clone the project in another language and lipstick it to look different.
- Dectanable 7mo ago
  I suspect this overestimates the value of raw code. Anyone can use an LLM to reskin a project but they can't use it to replicate the trust that's built over time. The moment someone forks the code, they inherit a massive maintenance burden. They have to manually verify every change or risk shipping broken garbage. Most professionals will gladly pay a premium for a signed binary from a trusted maintainer rather than risk their workflow on a cut rate clone. The real moat is not the source itself but the reputation. Setting the right price point is the actual challenge. You have to find that sweet spot where the price is high enough to fund development but low enough that the friction of paying is less than the friction of cloning the repo and building it yourself. If you price it like a corporate seat then people will fork it out of spite. The goal is to make the official binary the path of least resistance.

luxuryballs 7mo ago

Now THIS is Claude Maxing! /anakin-podracer-meme

pjmlp 7mo ago

This is a very great idea, Flash authoring was gold, and we already had a class of games in 2010, that 16 years later WebGL/WebGPU still fail to repeat, in available games and development tools.

Piraty 7mo ago

there is electron already. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14087381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14087381

ivanjermakov 7mo ago

New Flash that can't run in the browser?

ccppurcell 7mo ago

The creativity and range of newgrounds content was mind blowing. The focus on fun as opposed to money making was really clear to me even as a kid. I've always had this little conspiracy theory that they killed flash because it was a threat, too easy for us to make our own culture and fun without a wealth extraction step in the middle. I know it's not true but it's just a weird little feeling I have.

theanonymousone 7mo ago

Isn't that Flutter, i.e. an exotic language plus skipping DOM and drawing into a canvas?

gs17 7mo ago
No, when people say they miss "Flash", they mostly mean the editor.
bsimpson 7mo ago
Flutter's authoring environment is a text editor. This is rebuilding the Flash authoring environment. They are not the same. Nobody would author a kid's TV show in Flutter.

SonnyTark 7mo ago

I thought about doing this for a while, I was a Flash gamedev as an indie then professionally. Back then, once Flash projects start to scale up to get more commercial/competitive, the flash editor is no longer as useful for development and transforms to an assets creation platform that outputs loadable SWF files. The code moves to use Air/Flex SDKs which were more or less equivalent to the tooling we nowadays get with Go/dotnet etc. So while Flash was an amazing expression tool for learners/hobbyists and is amazing for gamejams since assets creation is part of the workflow, it did hold devs back at higher levels of production. Many Flash devs moved to Haxe to continue creating on that platform and it managed to survive and thrive.

vishnuharidas 7mo ago

There were many study materials that were made in Flash that came back alive with the help of Ruffle. Here's my fav list: https://astro.unl.edu/animationsLinks.html https://astro.unl.edu/animationsLinks.html

kriro 7mo ago

I never developed with Flash but my understanding is that "modern web" can do everything Flash was used for. So my understanding is that most useful thing is probably the .fla importer. Wouldn't it make sense to focus on authoring-tooling (animator+developer coop) and the importer but "export" to standard web tech?

LeratoAustini 7mo ago
Often in these threads people say that thing does exist (Adobe Animate) and it's all fine, prblmslvd. Rarely are those people who themselves used Flash extensively (although some probably exist). There's something missing though, something went wrong in the transition from Flash to Animate. Part of the beauty of working with Flash, at least as a newcomer or someone who leaned more towards graphics/animation than code, came down to a couple of main points: - Code was *inside* MovieClips (in Flash [almost] everything was a MovieClip, basically a timeline of frames). Code was attached to frames. When the playhead entered the frame, the script would run. Some of us who started as designers later leaned heavily into the code, but even those who were more comfortable sticking to the visual side of things would end up with a little grab bag full of scripts/snippets that they could just copy/paste into a frame and tweak without getting too bogged down with code. Even at a very simple level (if somethingsomething jump to frame 20, else loop back to frame one) this added a dimension of control and interactivity. Crucially, it was implemented well and very simple to understand. - Everything was nested. MovieClips within MovieClips. Timelines within timelines. Simple behaviours could be stacked up and lead to natural-feeling complexity just due to this nesting. Of course these things can be implemented today too, and other tools have and do implement versions of them. But there are often just 1 or 2 levels of abstraction too much, enough to put off some kinds of minds, or people at certain levels of experience. The thing about the Flash experience was that it all felt so fluid and intuitive. Direct. Learning it was fun. Animate (as far as I remember) did keep those paradigms I mentioned. The timelines were still there, the drawing/animation tools too. But something somehow goes wrong in the translation to modern web tech. If it didn't, people would have just carried on using Flash, outputting JS/HTML instead of SWFs and nobody would have noticed. A lot of the above is testament to Macromedia and linked to their other software, Director (similar to Flash but aimed more at desktop and 'interactive CDs'). They made software that was a joy to use. To give them their dues, Adobe pushed it further. Also their market dominance meant if you wanted to get into this web stuff and make cool things, Flash was *the* (only, really) way to do it. Which makes me think it may have been a time and place thing, which we won't get back. The modern web and range of options maybe makes it too diffuse, harder for something new to catch on. I hope I'm wrong. As others have said here though, maybe stuff like MineCraft and Roblox are filling a similar conceptual gap for different generations and I'm just old and nostalgic.

DonHopkins 7mo ago

Marc Canter (founder of MacroMind/MacroMedia) one explained to me something revealing about the Director timeline (their original product before Flash, later integrated with the web browser as Shockwave): It's essentially just a BASIC program rotated 90 degrees on its side, full of GOTOs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35652164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35652164 DonHopkins on April 21, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2... I love all the amazing inspirational open source examples of generative procedural art and artificial life that Jared Tarbell published on his web site https://web.archive.org/web/20070202025610/http://levitated.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070202025610/http://levitated.... . It opened my eyes to using Flash for procedural graphics and simulations, instead of just using timelines like a glorified graphical player piano, or like a BASIC program full of GOTO spaghetti rotated 90 degrees counter clockwise (which is how Macromedia founder Marc Canter described Director's Lingo, which also used frame numbers like BASIC line numbers). Jared went on to do a lot more amazing stuff in Processing, co-founded Etsy, and built a toy factory! https://www.artnome.com/news/2020/8/24/interview-with-generative-artist-jared-tarbell https://www.artnome.com/news/2020/8/24/interview-with-genera... https://www.artnome.com/news/2018/8/8/why-love-generative-art https://www.artnome.com/news/2018/8/8/why-love-generative-ar... https://beyondtellerrand.com/events/dusseldorf-2018/speakers/jared-tarbell https://beyondtellerrand.com/events/dusseldorf-2018/speakers... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_-9UWkgDf8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_-9UWkgDf8

phplovesong 7mo ago

Haxe used to be the goto for Flash development. Maybe it could benefit a project like this too. I assume the target is AS5?

thenthenthen 7mo ago

Sadly the website is blocking me and also my vpn and also my 5g :(

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

pmarreck 7mo ago

The first time I tried VideoWorks (which is what Flash was based on) on an early Macintosh was magical.

redenter 7mo ago

Sometimes I give presentations about how awesome the browser is. And everytime it reminds of all the capabilities we had back in the time. Easy animations, sound, 3D, augmented reality. Yea, we've got HTML5. But it took years to even come close to what we could do with Flash and Actionscript. Let alone how easy it was to create super cool animations.

JKCalhoun 7mo ago

I apologize, I have spent all of about one minute considering this—but I would think Flash for 2026 might simply be a wrapper for HTML5, Canvas. Likely there is already a Javascript library out there that closely fits the bill.

KaiserPro 7mo ago
flash player, yeah. the IDE, not really. IF it were that easy, someone would have done it, because the flash IDE was a bit like vim, but for a wierd mix of visual and coding. Like action script was object object oriented, but also kinda graph based, with time.
- JKCalhoun 7mo ago
  Thanks.

gethly 7mo ago

with js canvas, i am surprised "flash" has not made a comeback ages ago. maybe it is not flash itself but the concept that it represents that we have passed over already.

RyanOD 7mo ago

Good luck with this project. Very exciting! I used to teach high school computer science classes and we built web pages with this new thing called "CSS" (no more tables!) and games in Flash. Cutting edge work we did. Those were good times.

gaigalas 7mo ago

Synfig though. I know it doesn't export stuff or have interactive SWF things, but its whole 2D backbone is absolutely fantastic.

babypuncher 7mo ago

replacing ActionScript with C# is a big win in my book, I will be watching this project with great interest.

shevy-java 7mo ago

Would be kind of cool. Flash 2.0. Or 10.0. One may say "but but but HTML5!" - but many games or applications that used to exist, are mostly gone (not all but many). Flash was creative. Joecartoon was fun back in those days; the HTML version is kind of ... lifeless compared to it. Granted, a lot of the "old" internet was also different so it is hard to compare.

bsimpson 7mo ago

There's much love given here to Flash as a creative tool and as an on-ramp for UX engineering. Both well-deserved, and both reason-enough to support Bill's project. One aspect that Flash got uniquely right was the ability to push and pull on vectors like clay. It's the only vector editing tool I've ever used that didn't concern you with bezier abstractions and just let you directly manipulate them. I don't know what algorithms were that enabled that, but I hope that's part of this tool too! Curious if C# is the right language for an ActionScript revival. Feels like a strange choice considering ActionScript was the TypeScript of its day, but perhaps the prevalence of Unity now and the ability to share tech with the tool's C# codebase makes it a reasonable decision.

tonnydourado 7mo ago

That's cool and all, but can we pass a law that this can ONLY be used for games? Because I remember the web when flash was everywhere. The games might have been fun, but everything else sucked humongous balls. Let's not get back to that.

michalsustr 7mo ago

This would be great if it compiled to wasm! Rust has great support for it. And you’d get native architecture for free too!

AlienRobot 7mo ago

As much as I want to believe, I think this goes far beyond the ability of a solo developer with a patreon. I do hope it finds some success, though!

romperstomper 7mo ago

Long live the new Flash! :)