[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 :)

[noduerme]

They put an undocumented kill switch in players and then disabled them remotely in the wild. Such that no bytecode can be run on any machine that took the last couple years updates. Then they sold the player rights to a company that ransoms them by offering to bundle a working player with individual critical binaries at unlisted prices.

Laughably, they claimed this was ethical to prevent users from accidentally running insecure versions after they stopped patching.

I can still install Basilisk and run HyperCard stacks I wrote 30 years ago, but I can't run the dozens of games I wrote in Flash. It destroyed a good chunk of my life's work.

So your comment is rude. It's fine to move on and work in other languages, as I have, but to not be able to even show 80% of your portfolio because it was intentionally crippled by the company you rented the software from that you used to make it, isn't something you can move on from. It's been disastrous.

[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.