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Adobe Renaming 'Flash Professional' to ‘Animate’, Shifts Focus to HTML5
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As a designer and illustrator by trade, I'm as frustrated by Adobe's lack of vision as one can be. Quality alternatives like Affinity Photo / Designer, and Sketch are now at the center of my workflow, a spot once reserved for Photoshop and Illustrator. Ironically, however, it's Flash that keeps me locked to Creative Cloud. See, for film (and animation in particular), there's yet to be an alternative that rivals the likes of Flash and After Effects. For that reason, I'm happy to see Adobe evolving Flash into something viable in the interim.
The people who hate Flash are obviously not the ones who use Flash, and the ones who use Flash know that there is still no replacement that comes close.
The thing with Flash is that 10 years ago, it was awesome. All browser games and animations ran on Flash and it was super easy to code and create, so even 15 year-old me could make a game with zero knowledge about animation or coding, and still make something that plays like a real game. You can't say the same about coding games for iOS. My PC from 1999 could run Flash just fine 10 years ago, so performance wasn't an issue at all.
It became an issue when things shifted from desktop PCs to notebooks and especially phones and tablets. Things had to change, but the price of that change was that people had to learn to code properly and more efficiently, and Flash was never designed for that. That's great for people who can code and who make money off this. But for people who just played around with coding, it meant that they had two options: either learn to code properly or give up making games altogether. Either turn your hobby into a profession or give it up.
This meant that such games now often cost money, which was unheard of when all games were Flash-based. If you make something for the App Store, you put a lot of effort into it so you want to make money one way or the other, at least to pay for your developer account's yearly fee. You can't really just fire up your iPad and play 20 random games for free in a row. You can, however, take your computer, go on Newgrounds and play thousands upon thousands of Flash games non-stop for the rest of your life. Try doing that with iOS.
When my 7 year old nephew comes over, I just put on Newgrounds and let him play whatever he wants. He can't believe how many games there are to play, as he has a tablet at home which requires you to find and install every single damn game, and the good ones aren't free, and most are "trial" or "freemium" versions and crappy games that would work much better with a keyboard.
Tablets are meant to be the ultimate casual gaming device, but they simply can't beat my crap PC from 1999 that runs Windows XP despite having way more processing power and RAM. I find that a bit odd.
HTML5 is a perfect replacement for simple Flash animations like ads, but there is the world of pretty good (better than the average iOS game) free Flash games that is simply not being replaced by any new technology so far. And even if there is a way to do that, it will certainly not be something very easy to learn for someone who isn't committed to doing this professionally. If a kid wants to learn how to make a game but has the attention span of a goldfish, you may just get him to learn something with Flash as it will only take 10 minutes to make a simple game, but try teaching him XCode and you won't get very far, not to mention you won't even be able to play the game on the device without paying for a developer account. And what else can you do?
To me Flash was a way for someone who has no idea how to code to get into that wonderful feeling of making a game and playing it, sending it to their friends without them having to download anything, with a minimum amount of effort and knowledge. I don't think that when you make your first ever game, you really care about the performance and the sound of your PC fan, you're too busy enjoying what you created.
Hating Flash is like hating records because they're too big to fit into an iPod. The world evolves but that doesn't mean the old stuff is inherently bad, it's just that the new stuff has different priorities. Just like records, Flash has some nice things about it that work for those who like it, but no one expects it to be in modern consumer devices. That's not a reason to say it sucks. Just like records, if it's not your thing, don't use them and you'll be fine.
The thing with Flash is that 10 years ago, it was awesome. All browser games and animations ran on Flash and it was super easy to code and create, so even 15 year-old me could make a game with zero knowledge about animation or coding, and still make something that plays like a real game. You can't say the same about coding games for iOS. My PC from 1999 could run Flash just fine 10 years ago, so performance wasn't an issue at all.
It became an issue when things shifted from desktop PCs to notebooks and especially phones and tablets. Things had to change, but the price of that change was that people had to learn to code properly and more efficiently, and Flash was never designed for that. That's great for people who can code and who make money off this. But for people who just played around with coding, it meant that they had two options: either learn to code properly or give up making games altogether. Either turn your hobby into a profession or give it up.
This meant that such games now often cost money, which was unheard of when all games were Flash-based. If you make something for the App Store, you put a lot of effort into it so you want to make money one way or the other, at least to pay for your developer account's yearly fee. You can't really just fire up your iPad and play 20 random games for free in a row. You can, however, take your computer, go on Newgrounds and play thousands upon thousands of Flash games non-stop for the rest of your life. Try doing that with iOS.
When my 7 year old nephew comes over, I just put on Newgrounds and let him play whatever he wants. He can't believe how many games there are to play, as he has a tablet at home which requires you to find and install every single damn game, and the good ones aren't free, and most are "trial" or "freemium" versions and crappy games that would work much better with a keyboard.
Tablets are meant to be the ultimate casual gaming device, but they simply can't beat my crap PC from 1999 that runs Windows XP despite having way more processing power and RAM. I find that a bit odd.
HTML5 is a perfect replacement for simple Flash animations like ads, but there is the world of pretty good (better than the average iOS game) free Flash games that is simply not being replaced by any new technology so far. And even if there is a way to do that, it will certainly not be something very easy to learn for someone who isn't committed to doing this professionally. If a kid wants to learn how to make a game but has the attention span of a goldfish, you may just get him to learn something with Flash as it will only take 10 minutes to make a simple game, but try teaching him XCode and you won't get very far, not to mention you won't even be able to play the game on the device without paying for a developer account. And what else can you do?
To me Flash was a way for someone who has no idea how to code to get into that wonderful feeling of making a game and playing it, sending it to their friends without them having to download anything, with a minimum amount of effort and knowledge. I don't think that when you make your first ever game, you really care about the performance and the sound of your PC fan, you're too busy enjoying what you created.
Hating Flash is like hating records because they're too big to fit into an iPod. The world evolves but that doesn't mean the old stuff is inherently bad, it's just that the new stuff has different priorities. Just like records, Flash has some nice things about it that work for those who like it, but no one expects it to be in modern consumer devices. That's not a reason to say it sucks. Just like records, if it's not your thing, don't use them and you'll be fine.
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It's interesting to see that nobody even bothered to read the news or tried to understand it. At all.
No, Flash is NOT going away. It clearly says that Adobe is already working on the next version of the Flash player.
They merely renamed the authoring environment. Because it now supports HTML 5 - in ADDITION to Flash, not instead of Flash.
Flash will still be around for everybody who wants to use it - and that includes VMware and a huge amount of game developers. Developers now simply get the option to develop for two target platforms with one development/authoring environment.
It makes sense that they're shifting the focus to HTML 5. But for animation, most people are moving to Illustrstor and After Effects, as far as I know.
I guess if you're doing web development, Adobe Animate would be a good tool for animation. But for anything else, there are other tools.
I guess if you're doing web development, Adobe Animate would be a good tool for animation. But for anything else, there are other tools.
Incredibly talented people, like the folks at Amanita Design, have created many beautiful pieces of art with Flash. That simply is testimony to the fact that the tool cannot be blamed when amateurs and cretins fail to put it to proper use.
It's exactly that "awesomeness" that doomed it. Trade offs are everywhere, and trying to make a development environment so easy that kids can do it practically guarantees crappy software.
Adobe, just care about the money. They will milk it for as long as possible.....and this being Adobe ....it will be a while. ive not been impressed with my dealing with Adobe. Sadly flash will be around for some time to come.
Not just Adobe. This is a natural consequence of Capitalism. No matter the ism, there are always significant flaws. The major flaw in Capitalism is that putting money first and having competition doesn't always mean you'll get better products. There's also a race to the bottom, as we can see in much of the technology sector, especially PCs.
This has me a little nervous about the future of flash. There are a lot of applications for Flash beyond the web. I know animators who use it, I use it to make templates to dynamically update live on screen video/tickers/etc. using CasparCG.
There are a lot of other applications for it too. If all it is to you is a crappy web plugin (which it is), you don't understand how many people use flash beyond the web.
Actionscript 3 is pretty powerful too.
There are a lot of other applications for it too. If all it is to you is a crappy web plugin (which it is), you don't understand how many people use flash beyond the web.
Actionscript 3 is pretty powerful too.
Now at last they will eliminate all of the bugs and vulnerabilities along with the old name.
WUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
WUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
My experience is limited to buying their enterprise solution, and support afterwards. It's poor, capitalism or not . The problem here is arrogance , due to lack of competition and no CTO gets fired for gambling with one of the big boys....
I think the one thing Adobe should have learnt from Apple is that is is ok to upgrade your software and ignore all legacy issues. The fact the their plugin still runs 20 year old versions of .swf files is quite incredible. The other thing they should have learnt is how to make a half decent plugin for a Mac, I never had a problem with the plugin on my windows machine but my Mac fairly takes off with the fan speed.
Thanks Flash, I owe you everything. You were the best of of the web and you will be missed, just not by anyone who owns a Apple Device!
Thanks Flash, I owe you everything. You were the best of of the web and you will be missed, just not by anyone who owns a Apple Device!
I can't believe no one's post this yet! 
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
Someone threw a half eaten Apple on Flash's head and he dropped dead?
Meh. You can't expect everyone to have a sense of humor.. or a childhood it would seem.
Let me explain. Flash 'hung around' longer than Steve, not one lived a longer life. Get it?
So, Adobe has 2 animation programs, Edge Animate (an ok, but underdeveloped HTML5 editor), and Flash which is almost universally despised. Does Adobe:
a) Retire Flash and put a bit more effort into getting Edge Animate working better
or
b) Rename Flash to Animate even though they are already using that for another product, kludge HTML5 functionality into it and hire someone who can't even say Adobe properly to explain it, leaving the other product in limbo?
a) Retire Flash and put a bit more effort into getting Edge Animate working better
or
b) Rename Flash to Animate even though they are already using that for another product, kludge HTML5 functionality into it and hire someone who can't even say Adobe properly to explain it, leaving the other product in limbo?