Building a new Flash

[0]: https://rive.app

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.

Flash started life as a general animation tool with a highly-compressible vector output format and a browser plugin to play them. And maybe some basic interactivity, I never touched it until version 4, when it definitely had pretty rich interactive capabilities even though you had to program it all via repeatedly hitting a dropdown menu with all the commands in it. 5 was a big improvement on that front with freeform textboxes instead.

Flash kept being used for animation while also being used for an increasingly large amount of interactive stuff on the web and desktop. Adobe bought Macromedia pretty much entirely to get it and started trying to build a write-once, run-anywhere programming environment out of it. Like Electron, with all its faults of being a resource hog with the added bonus of regular security holes that only Adobe could fix at a snail's pace.

Apple decided not to let the SWF player onto the iPhone's app store, officially citing the resource hog and security hole problems. People stopped using Flash to make interactive experiences. YouTube stopped delivering video as a Flash player streaming Flash's streaming video format. People kept on using it to animate.

Some time after this Adobe renamed Flash to Animate. People kept on using it to animate. I didn't, I'd quit animating by then.

Some time after that Adobe removed the ability to export SWF files. People kept on using it to animate.

And some time after that Adobe said "fuck it we're done with this thing, we've barely been adding any new features for a while, we're gonna stop supporting it and turn off the auth servers". People who were still using it to animate screamed. Loudly. And Adobe turned around within a day and said "uh okay well I guess we'll, uh, keep the auth servers running and, uh, maintain a skeleton team to fix bugs for a while".

One month after that, some dude made a post on Newgrounds - one of the major online centers for Flash stuff, both during the 2000's boom and the modern day - about his clone of the Flash editor, that he claims is capable of reading Flash source files. And here we are.

tl;dr: pretty much yes except it was always an animation tool from the very first days