[CoolestBeans]

A thought I’ve had for a few years now is that the loss of the Flash runtime (and the rise of mobile) might have been the proximate cause for the end of fun small web based videos and games but what is really missing is an authoring tool as good as Flash was for HTML5. Virtually everything the flash plugin could do, a browser can do with canvas and whatnot. But the magic was really that the Flash authoring tool opened up to a canvas you could draw on with tools most kids knew from Paint. With a little experimenting you could figure out the timeline and start animating things. If you wanted to go even further and add interactivity, you could edit ActionScript again right in the interface. It wasn’t easy but the visuals-first, almost but not quite WYSISYG aspect made it pickuppable instead of like learning to wrangle a text editor or whatever. The closest thing now is Unity but to me it misses that immediacy and simplicity.