[irrational]

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 animations. One job we did was creating 3d renderings of printers. The printers could be torn down in the flash app to the smallest screw. A technician could choose what they wanted to do to the printer, and the flash movie would show them step by step in full animation what to do. At any time they could rotate the printer in all an axes to view different angles. It was amazing. And it was animators who knew nothing about code that built it all. The things they could do you just don’t see anymore.

I remember another project we worked on that had these mini games you could play in place of being multiple choice quizzes.

All of that is just gone. There was so much animation and interaction and fun that has been replaced with boring, text, images, and videos.

The best part was, it was all vectors, so the file sizes for even long animated movies was incredibly small. Back in those days we had very low bandwidth, but flash worked great. We had retailers in Asia that consumed our content no problem. Now our content is mostly text, images and videos. Those same retailers have higher bandwidth, but really struggle because the files sizes are enormous compared to flash.

[bartread]

Related to this, but building anything interactive in general was made super-easy by Flash because it was basically one IDE with everything you needed included out of the box. No complex toolchain, or ludicrous dependency tree, no nonsense build and deployment (though the fact that the default for Flash content was one giant binary blob wasn't always ideal when bandwidth was at a premium), no having to learn a new framework and toolchain every 12 - 24 months. And, frankly, were the security holes any worse than plenty of other apps at the time, or the constant parade of issues we see with our current dependencies that require ongoing vigilance and updates?

The big problem is it was proprietary and the cost of entry was high at a time when I was short of cash for quite a few years.

Still, I wish I'd invested in learning it back in the day, as I really only came to appreciate its benefits after its fate was effectively sealed by Steve Jobs: could have made some good money whilst having some good fun doing it for 8 or 10 years up to around 2010.

(Of course, I would have had to deal with the consequence of my skillset being obsoleted seemingly overnight, but I got kind of a taste of that from the Microsoft ecosystem as well: it's WinForms, no, it's WPF, no it's Silverlight, no, etc...)

[kinggencha]

While Macromedia/Adobe Flash was an important IDE for some time, we later developed complex Flash applications in code-centric IDEs (like Flashdevelop) and compiled using the SWF SDK from Adobe. This also came at no cost, as far as I remember.

[hackshack]

About once a month, I dwell on this. Modern web pages can easily be 20MB. You can do a lot in 20 megs.

Re-reading Apple’s “Thoughts on Flash” tonight, I was surprised at how many times Apple mentioned vendor lock-in. JavaScript is definitely here to stay. Ten years later, though, I wonder if we have ended up in nearly the same place we strived to avoid - high power consumption - but with worse authoring tools. But with at least open standards, which are good.

I figure the magic moment will occur when some tiny startup builds friendly authoring tools on top of a tight runtime à la Decker. Like HyperCard/Director/Flash it’ll only get you 66% there, but that will be enough for many folks. Hackers. Hobbyists. Students. Tiny companies, and guerrilla departments.

The challenges will be preventing feature-itis, keeping it embeddable / avoiding JS library dependencies, and making it at least free-as-in-beer with an open format. I know there’s space for such a thing. My money’s on some lean 5-person startup with strong opinions.

Decker: https://beyondloom.com/decker/index.html

[mike_hearn]

Worth noting that the SWF format was towards the end of its lifecycle and open standard as well. Fully documented with open source players and tooling available.

[ac29]

As someone who has used Linux on the Desktop for 20+ years, I can say with pretty high confidence that open source flash players could not run more than a trivial amount of real world flash content at the end of its life cycle ~10 years ago.

[stuaxo]

Ruffle.rs looks pretty promising for playing flash.

Adobe still has the editor as Adobe Animate - if they made it more widely available, I think there is a big demographic of designers that would like to make a bit of animation or active graphics that is not being served any more.

[dspillett]

> All of that is just gone. There was so much animation and interaction and fun that has been replaced with boring, text, images, and videos.

This might be partially a fashion thing: people want the flashy interactions less. I for one appreciate some boring text with minimal animation! Also away from games where animated interaction is part of the point, designing a good animation that works better than text+images is often not as easy as many think, and you need to contend with that before you attempt to implement the design.

As there are less people wanting to make the animations the tools that would have replaced the tooling for flash (but outputting SVG+JS instead), of which there were a fair few in active development at one point, have languished unloved and incomplete – so not only do fewer people want to make such animations but those that do want to don't have easy tooling to do so.

There are a couple of e-learning sites out there using interactive animations to illustrate their points, one often has sponsor spots on a couple of podcasts & video series I follow though I forget its name ATM. I wonder what tooling they use, if any (though I doubt it is all manually coded).

[warrenm]

>Also away from games where animated interaction is part of the point, designing a good animation that works better than text+images is often not as easy as many think, and you need to contend with that before you attempt to implement the design

The places where "animation that works better than text+images" is incredibly small

I can read faster than you can animate - speed it up!

Or I want to read longer than you animate - slow it down!

Text (+images) solves this perfectly - and has for millennia

[stuaxo]

There is a whole segment of the web that is now gone, things have become boring and uniform, and while that's fine for all sorts of sites, it's sad that we have just thrown all that out.

[warrenm]

I wouldn't say it's so much "we have just thrown all that out" as it is "we found out the overwhelming majority of it wasn't wanted or even 'good'"

[noduerme]

well, it would be nice if Adobe hadn't unilaterally nuked the ability for anyone to even look at it and judge for themselves.

[warrenm]

Adobe spent years telling people the end was coming - ending Android in 2011, deprecating in 2017, and only finally EoL'ing in 2020

If that wasn't enough time to move on, I don't know what to tell you :)

[esparrohack]

Homestar runner.

[philwelch]

For websites qua websites, sure. But Flash enabled a lot of animation qua animation on the web, natively. And unlike the videos you see on Instagram/YT/TikTok today, Flash cartoons didn’t require high-capital monopolistic intermediaries to host online.

[agent008t]

Switch to mobile played a larger role I think. People used to browse on PCs with mouse pointers and keyboards, now they do on phones with touchscreens.

[dspillett]

That would be one of the reasons that “people want the flashy interactions less” – though for good interactive animations, assuming screen-size is not a massive issue, touch could be a more natural interface than a mouse or similar.

[jen729w]

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.

[kome]

Bartosz Ciechanowski is indeed awesome; and indeed the web got worse. Boring. A template repeated million of times by people that know libraries, but no html+css.

[warrenm]

I'd say "boring" is not - usually - "worse"

Most of the time, it's far better: boring works. Boring pays the bills. Boring gets more people to use something. Boring is ubiquitous.

Everything "new" eventually becomes "boring" - and that's good

[esparrohack]

Yeah, that’s a HN fortune cookie.

You’re saying boring is popular which goes against the principles of aesthetics. People think pretty things are better quality. You do too.

Boring gets forgotten and replaced. Boring is not ubiquitous.

Notice how zed Shaw tried that quixotic ugly website trend. Supposedly that’s what the world wanted. The world ignored it.

I know what you mean tho. Boring refers to old tech vs new hype. The issue is they used the word “boring” to denote “mature” software, and that’s where it all went wrong.

Bad form.

[warrenm]

>People think pretty things are better quality. You do too.

some people think pretty=better quality

I am not one of them - I think better quality=better quality

>Boring gets forgotten and replaced. Boring is not ubiquitous.

Boring is ubiquitous - Diesel engines are boring. Diesel engines are ubiquitous. Apache is boring. Apache is ubiquitous. Wordpress is boring. Wordpress is ubiquitous. Reinforced concrete is boring. Reinforced concrete is ubiquitous. iOS is boring. iOS is ubiquitous. 1/4-20 bolts are boring. 1/4-20 bolts are ubiquitous. SQL is boring. SQL is ubiquitous.

Boring doesn't get "forgotten and replaced" - it gets used by everyone everywhere ... the very definition of "ubiquitous" :)

Boring doesn't equal "ugly" - that you think it does seems to speak to your lack of understanding of the nature of engineering: engineers love "boring" because boring works. Boring is reliable. Boring lets you build bigger things because all those boring things Just Work™

[esparrohack]

Yeah see. You need to read other stuff than engineering blogs.

I don’t care how you feel. Everyone likes prettier things. Where’s your proof that’s false?

You’re making up your own definition of boring. It’s just a bunch of talking points I’ve heard forever.

I’ve read the same stuff you did. But nobody outside of tech could call diesel “boring” tech

[kome]

fair, but it's still boring. i have seen a better internet...

[warrenm]

>i have seen a better internet...

I've been online for just shy of 30 years

Can't say I've seen a "better" internet in terms of aesthetics ever

[Treblemaker]

TIL of Bartosz Ciechanowski. What an incredibly gifted communicator. Thank you!

[mms__]

I just googled him to see what you were talking about. First article of his blog just blew my mind

[Springtime]

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 effectively frame-by-frame only though, not leveraging SMIL's path interpolation/morph ability).

[1] (ignore the GIF-converted examples, the originals are lightweight and vector-based) https://airbnb.io/lottie/

[yreg]

We use tons of vector animations in the UIs, but I guess what the GP meant are animations in the form of short movies like Happy Tree Friends or Animator vs. Animation. That style is no longer popular and it used to be everywhere.

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.

[resoluteteeth]

> 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.

Doesn't the animation tool still exist just not under the name "flash"?

My understanding is that the free browser plugin to view the animations that got killed, but the the actual animation software that was used to produce them got bought by adobe and is still widely used to produce animations, it just doesn't have the option to produce swf files anymore (and even during the flash plugin era it was also being used to produce animations for tv, etc.).