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The closest I’ve seen (and actually use) is Hype (https://tumult.com/hype/), but it is Mac only.
There's rive that's very similar to flash https://rive.app/
Allow artists to create simple animation quickly.
run fast.
The key selling point of flash was that it was an author once, run anywhere tool. I could use keyframe animation along with a simple scripting language to make almost anything. Not only that it was fast to build and deploy.
Nothing I've seen recently allows an artist to do the same. I've tried a couple of times over the years to make an animated SVG on the web, and all of them required me to program keyframes using code, which sucked. Not only that its dogshit slow. animating Worse still all of those libraries are deprecated now, so if I want to do it again, I'll need to start again from scratch and select a new animation library.
Maybe there is a vector animation tool that is as easy to use as Flash was, but that fact that we rarely see vector animations like we did back in the day makes me think not. I used to work with a group that created training materials using Flash. We had a bunch of animators that knew nothing about coding, but they could produce all of these amazing animated videos using Flash. They could also produce interactive ani…
Lottie[1], an Adobe After Effects plugin, fills a gap in vector animation authoring and is quite widely used (primarily in mobile applications but also works on the web, Discord for example supports them for stickers). It's a pity SVG animation authoring tools never eventuated since it's an underutilized but useful native format. Though I know Blender allows for SMIL export via its Freestyle feature (the animation is…
As for the cause, I think it's not only that Flash is dead, but also that there are now many other easy options to create content including professional looking video and much more refined animations. That wasn't an option 20 years ago for most.
There's rive that's very similar to flash https://rive.app/
It is also a cloud-based service that artificially limits what you can do for pricing, not a standalone desktop app. No thanks, I will resist buying into those for as long as I can.
People's use of the internet has changed, but the fact that there is not a new Homestar Runner or NewGrounds is telling. How much does a weird high school/college art nerd need to know about the tech stack to get their vision online? I'm old enough that HSR is still part of my lexicon. Kids just think I'm weird, which is fine.
The weird high school/college art nerds today are designing their own VTuber rigs, selling art commissions or making indie games. The biggest reason there isn't a new Homestar Runner or Newgrounds has less to do with technological limitations or complexity and more to do with evolving tastes over time. Also the fact that the new whatever would be either Youtube or Twitter. Or Tiktok. Or something most people here hav…
Among the top HN posts of all time is an interactive watch visualization: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31261533
This is evidence that people still enjoy interactive experiences, but they are just harder to create.
Maybe there is a vector animation tool that is as easy to use as Flash was, but that fact that we rarely see vector animations like we did back in the day makes me think not. I used to work with a group that created training materials using Flash. We had a bunch of animators that knew nothing about coding, but they could produce all of these amazing animated videos using Flash. They could also produce interactive ani…
And my mate Tim, a designer not a coder, could bang up really neat stuff really easily. Now you need to be Bartosz Ciechanowski and only he is.
I would say no, that modern browsers have the potential to do everything that Flash did, but it's not nearly as easy. While it is possible in modern browsers to make a) cross-platform, front-end web applications with b) smooth vector and c) bitmap animation incorporating d) multimedia sound and e) video driven by f) a backend API (called dynamic data back then), it is not nearly as prevalent as it was. Animations and…
I agree with the "not nearly as easy" part as long as you are limited to the usual HTML/CSS/JS stack. I think WebAssembly has a lot of promise here, as you can theoretically do anything you want in any language of your choice and have it run in the browser. Of course, this is also a threat to the "open web" where you are free to use your browser's DevTools to dissect the internals of any site.
I use CRDP (chrome remote debugging protocol)[3] to run Ruffle on pages that need it (sort of like a Chrome extension content script). Ruffle itself uses wasm and is quite fast.
It's cool seeing the audio and video work and playing those old games.
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[0]: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/wiki/Test-SWFs
[1]: https://github.com/crisdosyago/BrowserBox#bb-pro-vs-regular-...
[2]: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle
[3]: https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/tot/
Look the same on all platforms. Allow artists to create simple animation quickly. run fast. The key selling point of flash was that it was an author once, run anywhere tool. I could use keyframe animation along with a simple scripting language to make almost anything. Not only that it was fast to build and deploy. Nothing I've seen recently allows an artist to do the same. I've tried a couple of times over the years…
Provided you have Flash player installed. Doesn't the same apply to web technologies provided you have the same browser installed?
Nowadays with WASM and WebGL you can do basically everything in a web browser, but you'll take a 100x performance hit. Every game using Unity/Unreal + WASM needs to download 10-20 MB of JavaScript before it even starts loading the actual assets. With Flash, that could have been a 10 KB SWF instead. Similarly, Flash had really fluid animations that were drawn purely on the CPU. Why my 266 MHz P2 could have better vect…
A Unity wasm empty scene is ≈1MB: https://blog-api.unity.com/sites/default/files/styles/focal_... couldn't find a live demo to confirm, which strongly speaks against Unity being anywhere as flashy.