Discussion

nickpsecurity: I remember trying out Macromedia Flash 6.0. My GUI apps were ugly at the time. Learning to build something like I saw in the movies could take years. Then, Flash let me throw together beautiful, animated interfaces like it was nothing. One could do quite a bit after one tutorial.(Note: Quick shoutout to Dreamweaver 6.0 which was a power, WYSIWYG editor. Today, things like Pinegrow might fill the niche.)It's death as a hugely-popular tool was largely due to Apple and Adobe. SaaS model isn't helping it far as wide adoption goes. It also got popular through piracy which hints the replacement should be profitable and widely deployed like open source.I think this might be a good opportunity for a license like PolyForm Non-Commercial. Free users either can't commercialize their content or, like CompCert Compiler, must make the outputs GPL'd (or AGPL'd). The Flash replacement would have a fair, one-time price for unrestricted use with source or you share like they shared with you. What do you all think?

cosmic_cheese: Of the two, I think Adobe is most responsible for the decline of Flash. Even if smartphones had never entered the picture, laptops (where efficiency is important) were quickly becoming the most common form of PC, which would've eventually made Flash as it existed under Adobe untenable as well. The timeline was just accelerated by smartphones.Honestly I can't understand the mental calculus that went on in the heads of Adobe execs at the time. Yes, cleaning up the ball of mud that the Flash codebase had become and making it not so battery hungry wouldn't have been an easy task, but it would've futureproofed it significantly. Instead they decided to keep tacking on new features which ended up being entirely the wrong decision.EDIT: The constant stream of zero-days certainly didn't help things either. A rewrite would've been worthwhile if only to get a handle on that.

mikepurvis: The "pay to sell your work" model is basically what Autodesk does to provide a version of Fusion that's free/accessible to the hobby 3d printing market while still protecting their b2b revenue.I haven't looked in a while, but I believe there's music and audio production tools with similar approaches.

cableshaft: I made Flash Games back in the day. Here's my old profile on Newgrounds: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/One thing Flash had that nothing else has really seemed to replicate as well since, is an environment that both coders and artists could use. I'd collaborate with an artist, they'd make their animations within an FLA, send it to me, and then I'd copy+paste into the project file, and it'd just work. I could even tweak their animations if need be to remove a frame here or there to tighten the animations and make it feel more fluid, etc.That being said, I'm not sure I could go back to it now. I've been working with Love2D lately, and I prefer that (especially for the version control). FLA version control was always me going 'GameName-1.fla', 'GameName-2.fla', or when I got a little smarter 'GameName-Date.fla'. Eventually they let you split out the actionscript files into its own files, and that was better for version control, but you still had the binary mess of the FLA file.But all these sprite-based game editors just can't handle the crazy intricate animations that vector-based Flash games could handle. Porting one of my old games (Clock Legends) that had hundreds of frames of hand drawn animation for a boss that filled the screen would be ridiculously huge nowadays, but the FLA for that was like 23MB, I believe (I'll need to hunt it down, I have it somewhere), and several MB of that were for the songs in the game.Excited for this project though. It deserves to come back in some form.

AndrewDucker: This doesn't make it clear how people will run the end products.Is it targeting the web? If not then it's not going to be useful for the same things as Flash was.

HanClinto: > .fla / XFL import — This is the one I’m most proud of. You can open your old Flash files. As far as I know, this is the only open-source tool that functions as a full authoring environment and can actually import .fla files. Not just play them back — edit them.The backwards compatibility here is pretty clutch. I agree -- if he can build something that is compatible with old files AND pushes things forward for new, then this could do some really awesome stuff.

adrian17: AFAIK the .fla format was never fully documented or reverse engineered by anyone (FFDEC has an exporter, but not importer), so this alone would be a bold claim.

adampunk: Call me crazy, but I think the folks at newgrounds will figure out what to do with this new flash.

alhazrod: I wish Adobe had open sourced Flash - it really was a pretty amazing tool. They could have owned the proprietary developer tool market to support themselves...

alcover: May the Gods be with him. The nostalgia is very strong. Opening Flash and start a new project was an immense source of joy to me in the 00's.

lbourdages: Apart from the HTML5 export mentioned by another commenter, there exists Ruffle[1], a Rust + WASM reimplementation of Flash that can play swf files. It's used a lot on archive.org or on some websites like https://homestarrunner.com.[1] https://ruffle.rs/

hendersonreed: It says:> HTML5/Canvas export — Export to self-contained HTML5 with JavaScript Canvas 2D playback.

AndrewDucker: Thank you, I missed that. Excellent news!

nosrepa: Thank you for reminding me of the Clock Crew. The Internet used to be fun.

random3: I built a flash crawler to index all Flash while at Adobe. It started with Alexa top 1M I think then crawled. This was 2008-2010 I think so we had to do a lot of custom stuff, but we basically crawled then ran a headless Firefox with a custom headless Flash player that dumped a ton of data so also analyzed every flash at runtime and indexed all of that.We built a dedicated cluster in a colocation center in Bucharest to handle all of this. Had issues with max floor weights and what not. Then had to upgrade the RAM on on the cluster. No remote hands. Every operation was a trip to a really cold place.Used a lot of early stage stuff like Nutch, Hadoop, HBase etc. Everything was then processed and dumped to an SQL database with a nice UI on top. It took a few weeks to set it up, then we passed it to a team of interns that built the SQL database and UI on top. They learned a ton of stuff. Some are now in the Bay Area.The tool uncovered a ton of security issues.It was fun building it. I wonder if Adobe kept the data. It could be useful and/or good donation for the Computer History Museum.

cube00: They couldn't because it lives on in Adobe Animate which Disney as a customer among others.

999900000999: Unless this is open source I don't see the point.We can't trust closed source software for content creation tools.What happens when he gets bored?However, I LOVE C# and would totally be down to contribute if it's open source.

Shebanator: I think Apple is more responsible. One of Flash's chief benefits to the customers who paid the big bucks was that it 'just worked' everywhere. Once Apple stopped supporting Flash on the iPhone, that story was a lot less attractive.The bugs were definitely Adobe's fault: as with most tech companies, they were far more interested in expanding the feature set than they were on fixing the bugs and stabilizing the platform.

nacs: They may but note that this isn't an official Newgrounds project - this is just a user ("Bill") posting on his own Newgrounds blog that he has made this (its not Newgrounds' official blog).

noelfranthomas: Don't know much about this space, just curious why build this when we have Rive, Spline, etc?

egypturnash: Approximately a quarter century of editor UI muscle memory in everyone who's used Flash/Animate professionally. And a quarter century of people being used to the precise quirks of how Flash/Animate organizes the parts for a cartoon. And a quarter century of source files in a private format that can only be read and understood by Flash/Animate.

adithyassekhar: Thanks for sharing. It's stories like these I've read since childhood that got me into this. Those little adventures into remote places to work on some computers. This was my version of Indiana jones.But everyone's in an AWS world right now.

immy: Hype (YC W11) is for animators to produce HTML5 https://tumult.com/hype/

mock-possum: I just noticed in a dev stream for Cult Of The Lamb that they were using .fla files, what a throwback. I remember those days well!

grimgrin: ".fla / XFL import — This is the one I’m most proud of. You can open your old Flash files. As far as I know, this is the only open-source tool that functions as a full authoring environment and can actually import .fla files. Not just play them back — edit them."as to when they share the source, idk!

999900000999: Great.I'd feel better if he had some other core contributors, but this is a great start.

ellg: Whats the key difference between this and Rive? Especially now that Rive has full scripting support? Just curious more than anything, this does seem neat, especially the fla / xfl support (although for new things this doesnt seem like a huge killer feature)

adampunk: I meant Newgrounds the community.

Retr0id: It's impressive what people are able to vibecode these days!

latexr: There’s no mention of any vibe coding in the post. Believe it or not, there are people who are still able to program by themselves.

spondyl: This post raises a few flags in my mind that it was at least partly generated by an LLM? That isn't to suggest that this editor doesn't/won't exist, that the editor uses LLM-generated code (which is not a sleight) or that the claims are not truthful.The main things that jump out are the inconsistency in writing style (sometimes doing all lowercase and no punctuation) but then the brief rundown is all perfect spelling and grammar with em-dashes.The "Not just" parts stick out like "Not just play them back — edit them" as well as "This isn’t a proof of concept or a weekend project. It’s a real authoring environment."Anyway, best of luck to the author with their project!

GaggiX: I'm not the parent comment but if you look at the images they posted you can see that the icons of the tools seems very likely to have been generated by a LLM (the SVGs).

IvanK_net: I think that FLA and SWF have the same "container format", which was documented by Adobe, see https://open-flash.github.io/mirrors/swf-spec-19.pdf

PaulDavisThe1st: Who has authored anything they actually cared about using Flash in the last 15 years?I don't know Animate - is it basically Flash Updated (I've read here that Adobe kept some elements of Flash in Animate, but it is unclear what).Also, there are non-Flash players for .fla files (not editors, however).

roywiggins: The lists in the post look like they're LLM-formatted, em-dashes etc. It's fine, it seems like a fun project to vibe code. Not sure about raising money on Patreon for it, but

IvanK_net: In 2012, I created IvanK.js - a Javascript library with the "Flash API" for quickly remaking ActionScript 3 games into the web environment. But it required WebGL, which as not very well supported back then.I could remake several of my flash games quickly into web.https://lib.ivank.net/?p=demos&d=bitmaps

egypturnash: Which they have recently said they will be dropping all support for: https://community.adobe.com/announcements-539/adobe-animate-...A lot of people - including studios who use it for projects that can take years to complete - were very unhappy at the prospect of having the only tool that can read their mountains of FLA files (the file format the Flash/Animate editor uses, and used to compile into a SWF) stop working because Adobe turned off the auth servers. Adobe has pulled back to "okay we're, uh, putting it in maintenance mode, expect no new features, ever, just security patches".

PaulDavisThe1st: A lot of people made the choice to use proprietary tools for their creative work flow, rather than making do with and pushing for better open source equivalents.I have some sympathy for them - I am sure they felt it was the only real choice at the time - but not a whole lot.

LoganDark: Article title could use capitalizing Flash -- I thought it was about NAND at first.

dmd: God forbid anyone read past the title.

latexr: > The lists in the post look like they're LLM-formatted, em-dashes etc.No, not “etc”. What else looks LLM-formatted about them? Because em-dashes are not enough to claim LLM.Look, I get that you don’t care about proper typographic characters. You don’t have to, that’s fine. But many of us humans do.https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...And going from “LLM-formatted lists” (without any certainty) to vibe-coded project is a huge leap.

sfifs: More impressively, Da Vinci Resolve is actually free with no restrictions. It is a high end video editor that film makers and professional film studios use (together with hardware and some paid features) from black magic design. Incredibly impressive. Affinity Photo and PhotoPea are also now free without restrictions.

fuzzy_biscuit: Strawberry Clock is our king!

whywhywhywhy: Think in this day and age starting your project off saying it's open source but making sure to open the patreon first and take money before the repo is a bad start when the reason for the project existing is a closed source paid product is being discontinued.Especially if the dev is working on a sound editor, something Flash doesn't actually need before even having an outputted example up and running or even a video of it working.

K0balt: Hmm.

roywiggins: They are very even. They are uniformly bolded. They're long and comprehensive. Most humans would have more variation in length unless they were working to a template or a style guide.A more robust indicator are sentences like this: "This isn’t a proof of concept or a weekend project. It’s a real authoring environment.""It's not X, it's Y" is an LLM tell. "It's a real Z" is another. Together? I'm going to assume it's LLM generated.And as the sibling notes, the icons look like LLM SVG output. They're more mangled than even a rushed human would do.Again, it's fine. If I had more time I'd love to try to vibecode a Flash clone.

01100011: I know very little about this space, but wasn't Haxe(https://haxe.org/) supposed to be a sort of next-gen, modern Flash replacement?

benoau: Haxe provides a similar syntax to ActionScript, but it was OpenFL built on top of Haxe that provided similar APIs.https://www.openfl.org/

fenomas: GP meant Flash Player, not the authoring tool.

latexr: > the icons of the tools seems very likely to have been generated by a LLMThey just look like bad rushed placeholder icons. And why does that immediately scream vibe-coded?

GaggiX: They have the same same inconsistencies and incoherencies that I have encounter with LLMs creating SVG. Very different from what a human would have created (and I don't think you have to train your eyes to see it).

jezzamon: Seems fun, I would've loved for this to be a web app though. Given flash is so tied to the web, it would be fitting if the editor itself worked like that

fenomas: If it was possible they would have loved to - certainly by 2012 or so, and more likely by 2008-9. The reason I heard they couldn't is that by that time Flash Player was a massive 10+ year old codebase with lots of parts that were licensed or external and nobody had ever tracked which parts would be to be relicensed or rewritten.Source: I worked there at the time and knew the relevant PMs.

functionmouse: also thought it was NAND

tombert: Heck yeah.I've said it a million times, but I stand by Flash being the most fun development environment ever made.Being able to draw your cartoons, make them a movie clip, export to code, edit things around without having to re-count all the frames, built in hit-detection, etc. It's a blast to write software for Flash, and I am not sure I've ever had more fun than being a teenager developing Flash games in my bedroom with a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004 Pro (or was it Flash 8? I can't remember).Now, I'll admit that part of that was because I was a teenager at the time, and programming was still a cool novel thing to me, but I do think that the platform was uniquely fun and interactive, and I have been chasing that high for awhile without being able to find something to fully replace it. Stuff like Construct and GameMaker and stuff are pretty cool and fun, but they still don't really hit the same for me that Flash did.If we can have a new Flash, I will be very happy.

pushedx: Every so often over the past 15 years I've had this exact thought, "The world needs something which is exactly like flash. Not kind of like flash, exactly like flash."A whole generation of people learned how to create art, games, music, animations, using flash, and the same kind of tool hasn't existed since then.I think Minecraft and Roblox replaced flash for the new generations.

lelandfe: If you follow their mea culpa link, it says they're keeping (a type of) support.> Adobe Animate is in maintenance mode for all customers...> Maintenance mode means we will continue to support the application and provide ongoing security and bug fixes, but we are no longer adding new features.Of course, in my experience, such a lifeline never lasts much longer than the furor that earned it...

gs17: That's more of an ActionScript replacement if anything. What made Flash great to use was the combination of a good art/animation tool with scripting support in an easy to use package that exports to a format anyone can (well, could) run fairly consistently in their browser.

barbs: B

bouncyhat: It makes me so happy to see this. When I was in high school Flash was THE way that you could practice programming games with the instant feedback of graphics animation, key input, and playing sound. I enjoyed it so much that out of college I joined the Adobe Platform team right around 2008. I worked in the SF office which was formerly the Macromedia HQ before Adobe bought them out.There were some really cool Flash tools in the works around then. Some internal developers had gotten some version of Flash Alchemy to run Doom in the browser. There was a lot of work going on to add proper GPU integration into the platform. I got to see some cool prototypes. Ultimately though, my timing was poor. This was right around when Steve Jobs decided that the iPhone shouldn't run Flash. The internal lore&#x2F;rumor mill was that some PM had missed Steve Jobs reporting crashes in Safari enough times that Jobs was just DONE with Flash and had decided to kill it on his platform. I have no idea how true that was.There was a mad scramble at Adobe to try to figure out how to keep Flash running on the iPhone. The AIR team was actively looking into reverse engineering solutions so they could essentially deploy Flash apps that didn't look like they were written in Flash. They tried to rally the community with a "We <3 Flash" campaign. It didn't matter. Flash was taken off the iPhone and Adobe made the call to give up. In 2009 after a few waves of 2008 recession cuts they slashed a huge part of the platform team and I knew it was over.There were a lot of reasons that Flash probably needed to go, but I wonder about what the web would have been if it hadn't been killed around that time. Regardless I hope this project succeeds. <3 Flash.

mmooss: Very interesting. What was the objective?

Retr0id: Humans tend to use free icon collections or search the web for suitable images, rather than hand-writing SVG markup.

agnishom: I hope there is a feature that will let people export the artefacts to HTML5&#x2F;JS.

gs17: I'm very curious if the "ActionScript-to-C# transpiler" will actually work as well as he's hoping.

Retr0id: This isn't just some em-dashes, it's 126 of them in a single announcement post.

roywiggins: And not a single colon! Well, outside the smiley in the opening paragraph.Just read the first two paragraphs and there's a full stylistic whiplash. I'd bet $100 that the first paragraph was human-written and the rest were almost fully Claude.

tombert: I agree, I love Flash more than nearly any other piece of software that has ever been on the computer, and it's one of the few things I miss about moving to Linux away from Windows.I can still run Flash MX 2004 via Wine and play with that there, so it's not "lost media" or anything, but what I want is something as close to Flash as possible, that runs on Linux, and gets regular updates, and that doesn't require I subscribe to it for forever.I have a perpetual license to ToonBoom (that I bought when they were still doing perpetual licenses), and ToonBoom is very cool software, but it's purely an animation software. I also have a license to Scirra Construct 2, and that's pretty neat as well, but in my mind that's basically a game engine. Flash was this cool, weird hybrid of both a game engine and artistic software that I haven't found a good replacement for.With Flash, you could make a cartoon without touching ActionScript. It was designed around animation. If you wanted to extend the cartoon you could then add code, piecemeal, and if you wanted to make a full game then you could make a full game. It was great.

phendrenad2: [delayed]

egypturnash: Animation studios. I know for a fact that Teen Titans was animated in Flash&#x2F;Animate for its entire life, for instance; that’s directly from a former co-worker who was the animation director there. Lots of small productions, too. Animate is a lot cheaper than Toon Boom Harmony so tons of hobbyists use it.The only difference between Animate and Flash is that SWF export got dropped eventually. And a haphazard smattering of new features got added.You don’t play FLAs. You load them into the editor and output SWFs. Or various video formats. There are reverse engineered SWF players, most prominently Ruffle, but this is the first I’ve heard of anyone parsing FLA files.FLA is the source format, it is to a SWF (or other video file exported from the editor) as a PSD is to a JPEG, or a .cpp file to an executable program compiled with all debug info off.

Dwedit: I was in some instant-message conversations (Romhacking related I think) with CoolBoyMan before he told me that he was Strawberry Clock.

egypturnash: People started using Flash for professional work around 1995. "Open source" barely existed as a concept then, Wikipedia tells me the name "open source" was coined in 1998 and it took a while before anyone but programmers gave even half a damn about it.The first open-source studio-quality 2D animation package I know of was OpenToonz from 2016, which was a relicensing of a commercial package that dates back to the late eighties or the early nineties - Wikipedia just mentions v3 from 1993.Perhaps you should reconsider the amount of sympathy you have for the long-time users of Flash. Or perhaps not given that they are largely artists and the average HN user seems to be aggressively hostile to artists concerned about AI image generation.But anyway now there is a dude working on an open-source Flash clone that can read the editor source files, so all these people you have next to no sympathy for have something to celebrate.

moolcool: I think it's taken for granted just how good flash was. It gets hated on a lot because it was proprietary and insecure, but it's really impressive that they had a system where teenagers could make genuinely good games and animations, and then play them in web browsers on machines with Pentium IIs. There's nothing else like that today.

tombert: I think Adobe should have open-sourced the Flash player like 20 years ago.If they had done that, then it could have been incorporated into the web standards (or at least something somewhat inspired by it). Instead it took like 10+ years for web standards to catch up, Flash Player got crappier and crappier and eventually murdered in 2020.If they had FOSS'd it, Adobe could still be the de facto leader of web-authoring tech.

casey2: It's just selling a scam. I've never been impressed by a flash game, but I'm impressed by programs written in general languages daily and for longer than flash has existed.The worst thing about tech is people who don't know any better get advertised tools that aren't sustainable and aren't suited to the job. If someone sees a flash game and says "WOW! that's so cool I wanna do that", then I don't have problem with it. But if people want to learn a language and are handed an SRS app, or want to make a unique game and are told to use an engine that's when it becomes harmful (and in many cases viral due to network effects)

tombert: I gotta admit I don't really know what you're talking about.I think Flash was fun to develop in. It was easy and fun to write a game in it and it was something a lot more approachable and easier to distribute than trying to cobble together something with OpenGL or DirectX.Also, I think a lot of the games on Flash actually are fun. I played through Mystery of Time and Space a few months ago and it still holds up. The puzzles are clever, the jokes are funny, the art is likeable, it's a good game.But what I liked about Flash was that, because it was so approachable, there was a lot of creativity to stuff. A lot of the games weren't good in any kind of "objective" sense, but there was at least a distinct lack of cynicism with a lot of them. The people who made the games weren't doing it for money, they were doing it because they thought it would be cool to make a game. Some games, like Pico's School for example, were unlike basically anything that had come before it. Is Pico's School a masterpiece of game design? Nah, but it's certainly unique, and it was something that could be played on pretty much anyone's computer.

wisemang: Totally. I remember a thing where there were four horses that each had an a capella part and you could click each horse to bring that part in or silence it. They all harmonized together and the silly little animations for each was a nice touch. I want to say circa 2005.Anyways yes the security was abysmal but I’m sure it enabled creativity that wouldn’t have surfaced otherwise.

random3: It looks like there's a a bit of reversal in some areas (e.g. ML) and it may make sense to have more geographically distributed (edge) compute so maybe we'll get more diversity in the currently cloud-dominated space.This said, it was always cool when we could control the entire stack, but the reality was that once we scaled things up, we had to throw things over the fence to IT, DevOps, SRE and whatever name evolutions there were and the reality is AWS&#x2F;GCE&#x2F;Azure made things easier than dealing with these teams internally.

random3: This was around when we were trying to get Flash to work on the first iPhone, so we had a hackathon for a week. Since I was a distributed systems "hacker", I ended up doing what was needed :) and there were lots of questions related to the sizing of flash on web pages and what not. That's what started it - I simple python script that I refined during the hackathon to get the embed parameters etc.But once I started processing the data, it became a thing and we made a small cross-team team to get this going. We eventually expanded the effort in a few different directions and wanted to do a Flash analytics, but ended up with the internal tool only due to privacy concerns.

casey2: Nor any semicolons. Also full of nonsense. SWF fundamentally runs action script. The idea that you are going to have a AS3 to C# transpiler and a C# scripting engine AND export SWFs is incongruous. Again, "C# code executed when the playhead enters a keyframe." Now I'd love the oppurinity to learn, but ctrl+f c# here [1] shows 0 results. Though I'm sure I'm just misunderstanding the meaning here ( ≖_≖).[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open-flash.github.io&#x2F;mirrors&#x2F;swf-spec-19.pdf

latexr: The number is irrelevant. They are being used as separators on every list item, of course there are many. They could all be hyphens or arrows or colons and it would be exactly the same.Look, I’m not saying this wasn’t written with an LLM. What I’m saying is that you don’t know that judging by the em-dashes alone.

Sebguer: if you truly can't clock that this is AI written, you probably need to desperately develop this skill as soon as possible, because everything outside of the first sentence is so very, very clearly slop.

shminge: I've tried Love2D and enjoyed it but just found the lack of support for Lua was tough - how do you handle debugging and things?

idreyn: Flash created a medium. The particular genius of the authoring tool gave rise to a whole style of animation and game and thing-in-between that only existed in its time and could have only been created with the tool at hand. Software should aspire to this.

idreyn: I don't even have any use for this and I'm getting on the patreon. Flash and ActionScript were my home on the computer in my formative years.

raw_anon_1111: This is a myth that needs to die.The first iPhone had 128Mb of RAM and a 400Mhz processor and could barely run Safari. If you scrolled to fast you would get a checkerbox while Safari was trying to catch up.https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discussions.apple.com&#x2F;thread&#x2F;1732478If it couldn’t run Safari with decent performance, how was it going to run Safari + Flash?In fact when Flash finally did come to Android in 2010, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM and it barely ran then and killed the battery. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.Another anecdote is that the Motorola Xoom was supposed to to be the “iPad killer” because it could show you the “real web” with Flash.But it came out without Flash because Adobe was late. You couldn’t even see the Xoom home page on the Xoom when it was first introduced because it required Flash.

Retr0id: The number is relevant when the comment with the most em-dashes on HN (prior to 2023) had only 31. It's also not the only signal here.

Brajeshwar: I personally believe that Flash has had its day and should die a Hero, rather than be resurrected to become a villain.For being open-sourced, it was a pretty hot topic, especially at an interesting gathering inside Macromedia in the summer of 2005. Little did we know (or kinda) that it was going to take a different path with Adobe that Christmas.Honestly, I think, Flash kinda died way before the iPhone was released.

roywiggins: only thing I can imagine is that they are building it with Unity, hence the C#. You can compile other languages to SWF bytecode, that's what Haxe is.

Brajeshwar: I started my career as a Programmer and did a lot of programmatic designs. Unfortunately, I’m not artistic. So, my tools of choice for Design were Code and Mathematics.Early on, I saw my colleagues working in Flash but didn’t notice anything that interested me. I don’t quite remember the exact chain of events, but I think it all started when I saw a friend writing code called “ASfunction” inside Flash, “What? You can write code to make the drawings do stuff?”So, that was the magic; I can code and see things happen in real-time (no compilation, no render). And that was the only thing I did for quite a while.Unfortunately, the Flash IDE was a sloth. I spend most of my time writing ActionScript in TextPad and compiling it with a CLI called MTASC (from the same developer behind HAXE.org).[1] If memory serves me well, I used to maintain the ActionScript syntax for TextPad.[2]1. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brajeshwar.com&#x2F;2005&#x2F;haxe-programming-language&#x2F;2. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brajeshwar.com&#x2F;2002&#x2F;textpad-syntax-file-for-asmx&#x2F;

Brajeshwar: Yes, not the Flash IDE per se, but an ActionScript Editor&#x2F;Compiler. Nicolas from motiontwin.com released a tool called MTASC, which later gave birth to HAXE.

outlore: For someone like me who never got the opportunity to play with Flash, what are some modern equivalents? Is it Rive or Three.js? Or even Godot Web?

tombert: Well said, and I completely agree.Since Flash was an animation-first piece of software that still had a fairly robust scripting system, it was able to create very unique and interesting pieces of media that can kind of only exist as they are.People aren't making full on TV cartoons in Construct or GameMaker. This isn't a dig at those tools, they're good software, but the animation parts of them are targeted much more towards "animation for games".

tombert: Yeah, I actually got into Flash because I wanted to be an animator some day. I made some crappy cartoons but sadly my art skills never really improved, even with a fair amount of practice.But in the process I learned about ActionScript and found I had a lot of fun coding things and playing with different programming constructs.I keep meaning to try out haxe, it looks neat enough, but to me it's still kind of missing half of what I liked about Flash, which was the animation tooling.

socalgal2: I get that Flash hit a sweet spot. I'm not sure I get why nothing has really replaced it. There are other apps that give you animated vector graphics, in an IDE, with coding.Here's 2?https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rive.app&#x2F;editorhttps:&#x2F;&#x2F;cavalry.scenegroup.co&#x2F;I believe Unity doesn't do flash style vector animations. It will take in SVGs, turn them into meshes and apply skeletons. That said, it has replaced Flash in turns of the 1000s and 1000s of web games made with it.https:&#x2F;&#x2F;poki.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;unityhttps:&#x2F;&#x2F;itch.io&#x2F;games&#x2F;platform-web (majorty are Unity?)

odo1242: There would still be the security issues, but yea this is still true

tombert: Sure, maybe, but I think if it were FOSS'd back in ~2005, then these security issues could be addressed by a larger set of eyes, including the browser-makers themselves.If this hypothetical universe happened, I think we'd have had something akin to WASM much earlier. Flash already had its own bytecode and VM, and even had something roughly like Emscripten [1] to compile existing C++ code to Flash.[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CrossBridge

fenomas: They would have if they could have - answered here:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47256093

tombert: That doesn't surprise me, honestly.I wish they had been able to figure out how to do it, but licensing and patents and whatnot have held back lots of innovation.

general_reveal: Would this be happening without AI?

PaulDavisThe1st: > "Open source" barely existed as a concept then,I was introduced to "free software" and the GPL in 1986, as a PhD student at the European Molecular Biology Lab (Heidelberg).Your historical revisionism doesn't sit well. Yes, "open source" came later because some people didn't like the specifics of the GPL and wanted a term that could describe "source available" software under a variety of license. But by 1998, I'd already been contributing to GPL'ed projects for more than a decade.I'm well aware of the lack of free&#x2F;libre alternatives to Flash. But that wasn't my point at all. I'm not saying that people failed by choosing Flash over some (mythical) free&#x2F;libre alternative. I'm saying they failed by choosing Flash, period.Before proprietary software, there were almost no creative tools that were proprietary. Nobody bought proprietary paint, or proprietary paint brushes, or proprietary table saws, or propriety anything. The software showed up, and everyone was so gaga about what you could do with it that they just forget about the fact that XYZ Corp. controlled the tools 100%, and dived in. There were people warning them, but those people were ignored.

fenomas: I remember using that tool internally! Personally I think I only used it to get stats of which features&#x2F;APIs were popular. But I think other teams used it for QA&#x2F;conformance, like finding content that occurred in the wild but wasn't covered by test cases.

random3: Hahaha. Always cool to find users of the tools&#x2F;products you build, including the obscure ones, and on HN no less :))

intellix: I think Rive is quickly becoming a good Flash replacement. They started with vector animation and timelines and then started adding components and coding etc.

PaulDavisThe1st: OK, my mistake on .fla vs. .swf ...so the story is that Flash basically disappeared from the web, but evolved into a tool to do more general&#x2F;extensive animation (Animate) that continues to be used today even though the output is (essentially) never .swf files? is that more or less correct?

Dectanable: This is exactly the Ardour model (and what Aseprite did before their license change). It's a highly viable way to sustain a niche FOSS desktop app in 2026. Make the repo open source, but put a price tag on the official, signed binaries on the main website. The professionals who need this to get work done will gladly pay a fee to avoid spending an afternoon fighting with Avalonia dependencies and build environments. The starving students and FOSS purists can clone the repo and run the build scripts themselves.

qingcharles: Flash was great. Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?I remember trying to produce a Flash renderer in C# when we wrote DudeFactory to render out the characters after you used the Flash app to put all their clothes and accessories on. I think we cheated in the end and pre-rendered large PNGs of them all and used .NET to just layer them all with instructions sent from Flash.https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dudefactory.com&#x2F;

markstos: But will there be a browser plugin?

Dwedit: There is the Ruffle browser extension which will restore Flash functionality to very old websites.

Dwedit: Mewgenics had assets created using Flash.

luxuryballs: Now THIS is Claude Maxing! &#x2F;anakin-podracer-meme

troupo: > Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?This sounds like a "is there anything you can do in C++ or Javascript that you couldn't do in Brainfuck?".Flash was a complete authoring environment. Yes, you can replicste the output in JS+CSS (or more likely JS+Canvas&#x2F;WebGL&#x2F;WebGPU), but at what cost and with how much effort?

Dwedit: Adobe open-sourced the ActionScript 3 interpreter way back in 2006.

j45: Ruffle looks pretty amazing.

rtpg: It feels like we're fairly close yet so far. Lots of newer tools do have animation and tweening of arbitrary properties but then will just have bitmap image editors instead of a built-in vector editor for example. Or just make it really hard to tie all the stuff together.The ease at which Flash CSx would just let you draw a circle in a spot, then click on it to get its script file and immediately add a little bit of behavior is magic for prototyping

j45: Reminded me of this list of cartoons cerated with Adobe Animate (formerly flash)https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Flash_animated_televis...

j45: It was probably hard to imagine the rise of laptops, internet, and Flash.Flash itself was acquired via Macromedia as well.Adobe's business is keeping technologies billing, and while Flash had it's flaws, the world was not ready for it to depart as soon as it did, because there was not a capable replacement available.

ajkjk: a "scam"? really? I don't think there's one person who used flash and felt scammed somehow.

sneak: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.eeqj.de&#x2F;sneak&#x2F;prompts&#x2F;src&#x2F;branch&#x2F;main&#x2F;prompts&#x2F;LL...

zahlman: Huh. This page claims "This website requires JavaScript." at the top, yet I can read everything fine. TFA on the other hand is blank without JavaScript.

pjmlp: I disagree with it being the most fun, because I would also consider TP&#x2F;Delphi and C++ Builder.Now I do agree that even something like Unity or PlayCanvas fail short of Flash's game development experience, because the browser debugging for 2D and 3D development sucks.

Piraty: there is electron already. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14087381

pjmlp: 2D and 3D games, with good developer and debugging tools.

pjmlp: This is a very great idea, Flash authoring was gold, and we already had a class of games in 2010, that 16 years later WebGL&#x2F;WebGPU still fail to repeat, in available games and development tools.

pjmlp: All of those alternatives fail at debugging, because to this day browser teams don't consider 2D and 3D debugging tools something worthwhile having on developer tooling.So in some cases you need a native build to try to replicate browser issues, and then being able to plug into RenderDoc, Instruments, PIX,....Flash had the tools.

lukan: Rive is closest sonce they have scripring support.Threejs is a 3D graphic libary, something different. And godot web I never used but know of as a game engine, not a scriptable animation tool.

tombert: I have heard lovely things about Delphi’s and C++ builder’s fun factor (maybe from you on this very forum actually :) ), but I have not used those so I cannot speak to it.At least of the stuff I have used, Flash is the most fun. Admittedly I never really got into any other kind of graphics-first development like VisualBasic and the like. Flash just spoke to me for some reason.

wesammikhail: God I love the look of those old school sites. Takes me back to a happier time. Whatever happened? :(

throawayonthe: newgrounds is still around though

lukan: I used it, thanks for making it. (Did not released something with it, though)I switched to EaselJS, as this was supposedly the official supported libary of Adobe Animate, but then later settled with pixijs.

theanonymousone: Isn't that Flutter, i.e. an exotic language plus skipping DOM and drawing into a canvas?

ccppurcell: The creativity and range of newgrounds content was mind blowing. The focus on fun as opposed to money making was really clear to me even as a kid. I've always had this little conspiracy theory that they killed flash because it was a threat, too easy for us to make our own culture and fun without a wealth extraction step in the middle. I know it's not true but it's just a weird little feeling I have.

SonnyTark: I thought about doing this for a while, I was a Flash gamedev as an indie then professionally.Back then, once Flash projects start to scale up to get more commercial&#x2F;competitive, the flash editor is no longer as useful for development and transforms to an assets creation platform that outputs loadable SWF files.The code moves to use Air&#x2F;Flex SDKs which were more or less equivalent to the tooling we nowadays get with Go&#x2F;dotnet etc.So while Flash was an amazing expression tool for learners&#x2F;hobbyists and is amazing for gamejams since assets creation is part of the workflow, it did hold devs back at higher levels of production.Many Flash devs moved to Haxe to continue creating on that platform and it managed to survive and thrive.

hu3: Isn't it dangerous to give up all the code of a commercial software in the age of LLM?Competition can clone the project in another language and lipstick it to look different.

Nekorosu: That's absurd.

vishnuharidas: There were many study materials that were made in Flash that came back alive with the help of Ruffle. Here's my fav list: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;astro.unl.edu&#x2F;animationsLinks.html

Pfeil: As Godot is still very simple from the UX perspective, I'd prefer a set of tools to fully replicate the flash workflow instead of a dedicated app. Why reinvent the wheel? Stuff like keyframe animation editor etc is already there anyway and the engine is powerful enough. Just missing some tools, which could be easily added via the asset store.

samsartor: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ruffle.rs&#x2F; is pretty solid

Cr8: ruffle is a player for the output format (swf), .fla is the authoring format

RobotToaster: Technically you may not even need js, since SVG has integral support for SMIL.

Dectanable: I suspect this overestimates the value of raw code. Anyone can use an LLM to reskin a project but they can't use it to replicate the trust that's built over time. The moment someone forks the code, they inherit a massive maintenance burden. They have to manually verify every change or risk shipping broken garbage. Most professionals will gladly pay a premium for a signed binary from a trusted maintainer rather than risk their workflow on a cut rate clone.The real moat is not the source itself but the reputation. Setting the right price point is the actual challenge. You have to find that sweet spot where the price is high enough to fund development but low enough that the friction of paying is less than the friction of cloning the repo and building it yourself. If you price it like a corporate seat then people will fork it out of spite. The goal is to make the official binary the path of least resistance.

DonHopkins: Marc Canter (founder of MacroMind&#x2F;MacroMedia) one explained to me something revealing about the Director timeline (their original product before Flash, later integrated with the web browser as Shockwave):It's essentially just a BASIC program rotated 90 degrees on its side, full of GOTOs.https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35652164DonHopkins on April 21, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2...I love all the amazing inspirational open source examples of generative procedural art and artificial life that Jared Tarbell published on his web site https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20070202025610&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;levitated.... .It opened my eyes to using Flash for procedural graphics and simulations, instead of just using timelines like a glorified graphical player piano, or like a BASIC program full of GOTO spaghetti rotated 90 degrees counter clockwise (which is how Macromedia founder Marc Canter described Director's Lingo, which also used frame numbers like BASIC line numbers).Jared went on to do a lot more amazing stuff in Processing, co-founded Etsy, and built a toy factory!https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.artnome.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2020&#x2F;8&#x2F;24&#x2F;interview-with-genera...https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.artnome.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2018&#x2F;8&#x2F;8&#x2F;why-love-generative-ar...https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beyondtellerrand.com&#x2F;events&#x2F;dusseldorf-2018&#x2F;speakers...https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=b_-9UWkgDf8

adrian17: I'm talking about the .fla (XFL) format, not .swf (which is documented well - though that doesn't mean its exact behavior its understood well)(note: I'm one of Ruffle's maintainers)

DonHopkins: ESR's "Linus's Law" is complete bullshit. And Linux Torvalds should be blamed for it, since it wasn't his law, ESR just named it after him to get attention.https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Linus%27s_law>In Facts and Fallacies about Software Engineering, Robert Glass refers to the law as a "mantra" of the open source movement, but calls it a fallacy due to the lack of supporting evidence and because research has indicated that the rate at which additional bugs are uncovered does not scale linearly with the number of reviewers; rather, there is a small maximum number of useful reviewers, between two and four, and additional reviewers above this number uncover bugs at a much lower rate.[4] While closed-source practitioners also promote stringent, independent code analysis during a software project's development, they focus on in-depth review by a few and not primarily the number of "eyeballs".[5]>The persistence of the Heartbleed security bug in a critical piece of code for two years has been considered a refutation of Raymond's dictum.[6][7][8][9] Larry Seltzer suspects that the availability of source code may cause some developers and researchers to perform less extensive tests than they would with closed source software, making it easier for bugs to remain.[9] In 2015, the Linux Foundation's executive director Jim Zemlin argued that the complexity of modern software has increased to such levels that specific resource allocation is desirable to improve its security. Regarding some of 2014's largest global open source software vulnerabilities, he says, "In these cases, the eyeballs weren't really looking".[8] Large scale experiments or peer-reviewed surveys to test how well the mantra holds in practice have not been performed.[10]>Empirical support of the validity of Linus's law[11] was obtained by comparing popular and unpopular projects of the same organization. Popular projects are projects with the top 5% of GitHub stars (7,481 stars or more). Bug identification was measured using the corrective commit probability, the ratio of commits determined to be related to fixing bugs. The analysis showed that popular projects had a higher ratio of bug fixes (e.g., Google's popular projects had a 27% higher bug fix rate than Google's less popular projects). Since it is unlikely that Google lowered its code quality standards in more popular projects, this is an indication of increased bug detection efficiency in popular projects.https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43133598>He made up the ridiculous "many eyes" quote himself, then misnamed it "Linus's Law" to avoid personal responsibility and shift the blame to innocent Linus Torvalds, who never said such a stupid thing, and which HeartBleed and many other eyeballable bugs proved terribly wrong and misguided. About which the salty security expert Theo de Raadt famously said "Oh right, let's hear some of that "many eyes" crap again. My favorite part of the "many eyes" argument is how few bugs were found by the two eyes of Eric (the originator of the statement). All the many eyes are apparently attached to a lot of hands that type lots of words about many eyes, and never actually audit code."

dizhn: Before opening the comments I made a bet with myself that the top comment would be about how someone made flash games in the 2000s and nothing really replaced it in the coming years. :)

__jonas: Rive looks pretty nice, but a subscription pricing model without any option for offline use for an authoring tool like that is very unappealing to me.

phplovesong: Haxe used to be the goto for Flash development. Maybe it could benefit a project like this too. I assume the target is AS5?

0x1ceb00da: Original adobe tools for flash should still work on windiws&#x2F;wine. Why don't people use them to make things?

hrmtst93837: In my experience what made Flash special wasn't the SWF runtime but teh FLA as a single editable file that bundled timeline, vectors, and code so an artist could hand over an animation and a developer could open the same file and tweak frames without a full rebuild. To recreate that loop I built a pipeline where artists export PNG sequences from Adobe Animate, TexturePacker packs them into atlases, a small tool emits a JSON timeline with frames as {spriteIndex,durationMs,easing}, and an AssetPostprocessor in Unity or an import plugin in Godot hot-reloads that JSON into AnimationClips so timing can be nudged in-editor. I've found the practical tradeoff is bigger assets and more import complexity, so make your timeline format human-readable for sensible git diffs, keep per-animation metadata minimal for easier merges, and accept that you'll be debugging the importer at 2am while an artist asks for 'one frame faster' but iteration speed pays off.

k33n: Rive has an open SDK and my understanding is that you could build an entire app without ever opening theirs. But then there goes the “flash” vibe, unfortunately. Their primitives are also a little obscure without their IDE.

thenthenthen: Sadly the website is blocking me and also my vpn and also my 5g :(

wink: The versioning was indeed a bit of a pain, also anything with dynamic input.I was pretty proud of a solution where we could feed a web CMS that had a flash and a html version with the same editable text fields. IIRC you could grab the input of some fields from a text file and Flash didn't care where these came from, so on save the CMS just spit out a bunch of text files in a folder. That must have been around 2001.

wongarsu: SVG + CSS + JS was hailed as the Flash-killer. But authoring tools never materialized. The tech stack can render the same things, but the process of creating anything beyond a static image in SVG is night and day compared to making the same thing in Flash

pmarreck: The first time I tried VideoWorks (which is what Flash was based on) on an early Macintosh was magical.

amenghra: Flash died once people no longer had a flash player. The tooling might also need updating if the apps being built are targeting today’s touch devices.

redenter: Sometimes I give presentations about how awesome the browser is. And everytime it reminds of all the capabilities we had back in the time. Easy animations, sound, 3D, augmented reality. Yea, we've got HTML5. But it took years to even come close to what we could do with Flash and Actionscript. Let alone how easy it was to create super cool animations.

lukan: Having an integrated sound editor does sound like a nice to have feature, but I also would be rather interested in a working example.

lukan: I don't like lists like these as I sometimes use half of the "signs" in my writing. And it would be trivial, feeding that list to a LLM and tell it to avoid that style.

squidbeak: That different path was grim. Adobe wrecked or killed a lot of really good software after the buyout. Freehand and Fireworks were incredible for their day.

gf000: > is an environment that both coders and artists could use.Maybe Rive fits this well enough? (Not affiliated, just looked into it at a time from a render engine perspective)

dnpls: I came here thinking the same. To me, it looks like Rive is the closest tool with the highest potential to be a Flash replacement.

latexr: It’s ironic that you’re being condescending when you’re utterly failing to understand the point it is not about the post.

andai: Remember how mobile sites were the same thing except with less personality? And then they figured out they could remove what little personality remained and call it progress? And then they realized they could do that on desktop too?

andai: Indeed they do, at least once a year :)https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newgrounds.com&#x2F;bbs&#x2F;topic&#x2F;1554561&#x2F;1

andai: Yeah, there's two approaches to rendering Flash vector art.You can turn the curves into polygons, or render them to textures. Ruffle, I recall, makes everything polygons (so it's a little chunky if you zoom in?), and Super Meat Boy rendered everything to textures.I'm not sure what the actual flash player did, which seems to have pretty decent performance relative to Ruffle in my testing.Maybe they have some proprietary technique for rendering curves quickly on a GPU? (I read a paper on rendering curves, and there's OpenVG, which I think came later and nobody uses?)

dnpls: Have you tried Rive? It seems to have a lot of potential for game development.

frou_dh: Safari's devtools has a visual <canvas> debugger. I remember using it, seeing all the CanvasRenderingContext2D calls that affected the canvas listed, and scrubbing left and right through time to see how a frame was built up.

embedding-shape: It's a UI authoring toolkit, you could do entire games in it I suppose, but you'd be fighting against it, rather than being helped by it.Better to go the route of doing Spine2D animations then leverage a real game engine like Godot or Unity and load the animations there.But then you're essentially back to "traditional game development" which is very different from what you could do with Macromedia's Flash back in the day.

hobofan: I think Rive[0] is quite competitive with what was possible back then in covering the full authoring stack.[0]: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rive.app

KaiserPro: > Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?probably not. The only difference is that it'd be build once display everywhere. Flash meant that everything looked the same regardless of browser or platform.Its a lot better nowadays, but its not as easy as flash was.The _key_ thing thats missing is the flash IDE&#x2F;designer. There are no compelling editors&#x2F;environments that allows both artists and coders to work in the same space.Sure I can use Illustrator to make graphics, but there are no animation systems out there that allow me to animate well (I can render a unity app to HTML&#x2F;JS but thats not quite the same)

matula: > a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004 Pro...This is an under-appreciated aspect of Flash's popularity, and probably a reason why Animate didn't have the same appeal. A kid could get a "free" cracked copy and make fun things.... and maybe not help Adobe&#x2F;Macromedia's bottom-line, it DID help the general ecosystem.Rive seems fine, but monthly subscriptions need to die in a fire. I'm not going to pay $10&#x2F;month to allow me to build some stupid animation idea I have every few months. There are a few, like GameMaker, that do one-time pricing... but even that doesn't scratch the same itch Flash did for me.

JKCalhoun: I apologize, I have spent all of about one minute considering this—but I would think Flash for 2026 might simply be a wrapper for HTML5, Canvas. Likely there is already a Javascript library out there that closely fits the bill.

KaiserPro: flash player, yeah.the IDE, not really. IF it were that easy, someone would have done it, because the flash IDE was a bit like vim, but for a wierd mix of visual and coding.Like action script was object object oriented, but also kinda graph based, with time.

WillAdams: Guaranteed deployment, and the lack of an IDE which works for both programmers and artists were definitely the two advantages Flash had.I'd really like to find a replacement which clicks for me the way it did --- started out w&#x2F; its predecessor, Futurewave Smartsketch (used it on PenPoint, Mac and Windows, and for Windows, continued using through a succession of pen tablets, most notably my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 which I despair of replacing --- transflective displays went out of vogue).

JKCalhoun: Thanks.

ecocentrik: Flash should have transitioned into an authoring tool for SVG + CSS + JS but it just took a knee because so many people hated flash for all of its warts by the time SVG and Canvas moved vector graphics rendering to the browser. Flash was a real pain the ass for most web users and Web 2.0 technologies did kill it.

Someone: [delayed]

tombert: Man you really took issue with a small part of what I said.Writing forty paragraphs about your opinion of the “many eyes” thing is interesting enough, but I stand by what I said. If Flash player had been FOSS I think it could have been integrated into browser standards and you’d have browser makers able to fix things and integrate better sandboxing since it could be part of the standard.

gethly: with js canvas, i am surprised "flash" has not made a comeback ages ago. maybe it is not flash itself but the concept that it represents that we have passed over already.

kriro: I never developed with Flash but my understanding is that "modern web" can do everything Flash was used for. So my understanding is that most useful thing is probably the .fla importer. Wouldn't it make sense to focus on authoring-tooling (animator+developer coop) and the importer but "export" to standard web tech?

LeratoAustini: Often in these threads people say that thing does exist (Adobe Animate) and it's all fine, prblmslvd. Rarely are those people who themselves used Flash extensively (although some probably exist). There's something missing though, something went wrong in the transition from Flash to Animate.Part of the beauty of working with Flash, at least as a newcomer or someone who leaned more towards graphics&#x2F;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&#x2F;snippets that they could just copy&#x2F;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&#x2F;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&#x2F;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.

gs17: > Code was inside MovieClips (in Flash [almost] everything was a MovieClip, basically a timeline of frames). Code was attached to frames.It will be interesting to see if this project ends up working more like AS2 or AS3. AS2 gamedev was a real mess, but it sure was great for the simplest things.

bsimpson: Flutter's authoring environment is a text editor. This is rebuilding the Flash authoring environment. They are not the same.Nobody would author a kid's TV show in Flutter.

bsimpson: There's much love given here to Flash as a creative tool and as an on-ramp for UX engineering. Both well-deserved, and both reason-enough to support Bill's project.One aspect that Flash got uniquely right was the ability to push and pull on vectors like clay. It's the only vector editing tool I've ever used that didn't concern you with bezier abstractions and just let you directly manipulate them.I don't know what algorithms were that enabled that, but I hope that's part of this tool too!Curious if C# is the right language for an ActionScript revival. Feels like a strange choice considering ActionScript was the TypeScript of its day, but perhaps the prevalence of Unity now and the ability to share tech with the tool's C# codebase makes it a reasonable decision.

mfabbri77: OpenVG is just an API by Kronos group, that was never implemented by hardware vendors on desktop graphic cards (it was specifically created for mobiles, as OpenGL|ES).Btw, there exists several implementations, with pure CPU rendering (like AmanithVG SRE) and others with GPU backends.

lightedman: "I never developed with Flash but my understanding is that "modern web" can do everything Flash was used for."True, it can, BUT what's lacking in the total arena is actual authoring and development toolchains, which is what Flash packaged all in one single bundle.I'm not trying to install 4 or 5 different things, along with all of their dependencies, just to make some 200MB thing that could have been done in 20MB and one program with Flash.

tonnydourado: That's cool and all, but can we pass a law that this can ONLY be used for games? Because I remember the web when flash was everywhere. The games might have been fun, but everything else sucked humongous balls. Let's not get back to that.

michalsustr: This would be great if it compiled to wasm! Rust has great support for it. And you’d get native architecture for free too!

paradox460: I still can't find anything quite as good for web authoring as fireworks.

sneak: You’d think; that was why I made the list. Unfortunately it doesn’t actually work. It rewrites to exclude one tell, and it includes 3 other ones.

lukan: Interesting, I guess I will try that out as well.

AlienRobot: Every time I see SVG mentioned with Flash I just think it's immensely ignorant. No offense, but programmers love to think of "vectors" as SVG because it's all they know. For several years I kept hearing people say "we have HTML5 and SVG now, so we don't need Flash anymore." And with that Flash animations and games were lost forever and I'm still bitter about it.For artists, SVG is probably the worst vector format imaginable. In fact, I'd say any project that uses SVG as backend is doomed to fail with artists. It's pretty much a red flag at this point that if "supports vector" means "support SVG" they're doing it wrong and just chose the easiest to implement vector graphics because you probably have a billion open source SVG libraries at this point instead of rolling their own proprietary vector rendering algorithm that actually improves the artists' workflow.To answer your question, the important thing about Flash wasn't the vector rendering but the vector art authoring tools. You could make Inkscape work like Flash, but nobody has done that yet. All you need is a brush tool that automatically does union of shapes of same color and subtraction of shapes of different color so the whole layer is always "flattened" with no shapes overlapping. This is the sort of thing that made Flash exceedingly easy to use for artists. It was a vector art program that worked exactly the same way as a raster digital art program. It thought of vectors not as shapes that the program was going to render but as paint strokes on a canvas.If you were building a vector art software today you probably would want all sorts of things that SVG doesn't provide, e.g. line art with varying thickness based on tablet pressure (although Flash didn't need this, since you could draw shapes instead of strokes). You might also want to take a look at OpenToonz' vector implementation, which has "fills" that automatically expand when you change the enclosing strokes and an indexed color palette system, and CSP's line art vectors that let you use textured raster brushes with settings like dab scattering in vector strokes.By the way, I also believe the idea that HTML5 could replace Flash games was insanely stupid. Anyone could make a Flash game and deploy it to web browsers in one click. Do that in HTML? With Javascript? Which means you need to download all these images&#x2F;audio from the Internet? You want to play it locally? CORS issues, baby! Now you need to turn this mess into an electron app or use the most disgusting build step imaginable to turn whole jpegs into a base64 strings so you can create a single HTML file that is several megabytes. How did the entire world convince themselves that this was an actual replacement of Flash's functionality is honestly beyond me. For Flash websites, sure, you have <video> now, but for everything else that Flash provided there has never been a proper replacement (at least until Godot&#x2F;Unity started WASM'ing, but that was a long time after).

Chris2048: Isn't SVG just a format? For example "line art with varying thickness based on tablet pressure" - isn't that an authoring-tool thing?

Chris2048: Hmm. I wonder why a GAN can't remove these tells?

zamadatix: It looks like rather than force the page to not load at all or just silently allow many parts of the page to be missing & broken they put up a message to let you know the latter would be the case.