[justsee]

I think you're both right and wrong.

You're right from the perspective that capabilities have increased, not decreased (though that was not true for a period during the flash / HTML5 crossover). You can make anything you want – and more – in the current context, and any particular historical format or container love is anachronistic pointlessness.

But you're wrong in the sense that development paradigm represented an era where programmers and non-programmers alike could dive in to explore, conceive and create experiences in a way that is more interesting and accessible to a broader group of people than today's more modern, powerful practices.

The flash plugin itself, as a format, does not enable something different, but the editing environment and culture definitely did, so in some way the death of the container does mark an end of a particular creative era in digital society.

Perhaps only for the participants, and even then I'm not mournful, but it is an ever-so-slightly sentimental moment for those that witnessed that fusion of creativity between types who were decidedly not technologoical and those who were, fused in a shared creative endeavour.

[CharlesW]

> But you're wrong in the sense that development paradigm represented an era where programmers and non-programmers alike could dive in to explore, conceive and create experiences in a way that is more interesting and accessible to a broader group of people than today's more modern, powerful practices.

The parent commenter is correct. Adobe Animate is literally the Flash creation tool you remember, and provides the same experience.

[1] "Adobe Animate (formerly Adobe Flash Professional, Macromedia Flash, and FutureSplash Animator) is a multimedia authoring and computer animation program developed by Adobe Systems." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Animate

[spiralganglion]

I'm the lead on an art/dev team where Animate is our main graphics app. We've been making Flash-based graphics, animations, games, and other media for almost 20 years. Our artists enjoy the idiosyncrasies of Animate, and find it easier to work with (to create the style of art we've arrived at) than Illustrator, Affinity, etc.

The fact that Animate can export to a web-compatible format is not sufficient for replicating the richness of Flash-based media with web standards. We tried. The output was far too bloated and inconsistent and didn't interact well with other web content. It also didn't support many the features of SWFs that we had previously been using.

We ended up writing our own JS animation framework that works with Animate-exported SVGs. It's faster and leaner than the web export from Animate, and we were able to figure out ways to replicate the special features we needed (or design around them). Plus, it acts like responsible, interoperable web content, not a blob of JS that acts like a compiled binary.

Point being — there's a lot more nuance here. Yes, Adobe Animate is the same tool as ever. But the fact that you can't as easily take the output from that tool, publish it, and get an It Just Works™ experience means there's a significant barrier now that never used to exist.

[CharlesW]

> The output was far too bloated and inconsistent and didn't interact well with other web content.

Well that's unfortunate.

"Bloated" I get, since there's no longer a black-box binary output format.

"Inconsistent" I'm not sure I understand, since presumably Animate's output is consistent. Does Animate create content that isn't rendered consistently across browsers?

"Didn't interact well with other web content" is interesting, because Flash never did this well IIRC. What was lost?

> We ended up writing our own JS animation framework that works with Animate-exported SVGs.

Neat!

[MichaelZuo]

So in reality Flash is no more for the casual/novice/time-constrained/etc. user, unless Adobe makes a one-click solution for the new intervening steps in the future. But of course by then the web will be a much different place. So the original poster was correct.