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Flash should still have its legitimation as an authoring tool. I think the direct approach in which you can throw together a scene or an animation has its value
by baumgarn 11y ago
Flash should still have its legitimation as an authoring tool. I think the direct approach in which you can throw together a scene or an animation has its value. The tools you use influence design decisions. Of course, technology wise, we should be happy without it. But if you always start a project with coding first, it limits your thinking. I fancy all the nice webgl demos and data visualizations, but they mostly lack a meaningful human perspective. Authoring tools like Flash and Director did provide a different feedback loop, not a data point of view but a narrative one.
- spiralganglion 11y agoStrongly agree. The company I work for makes interactive/animated training media. While I work as a coder doing mostly server-side stuff, I can vouch for the power that the Flash authoring environment provided. It was rather similar to something like Unity, with a tightly integrated scenegraph and coding environment. For our team of animators who (by necessity, not by choice) picked up some coding chops on the job, it was a huge blessing. Moving everything over to web technology has been extremely painful for exactly one reason: lack of a decent authoring workflow for interactive animations. There's nothing that can even touch Flash in this regard.