Adobe Animate, Flash, was like an old friend. We didn’t keep in touch.
Macromedia Flash, now Adobe Animate was my first introduction to both design for the web and web development. It was the first program I learned inside and out — after Adobe Photoshop.
Knowing Flash (as I prefer to call it) was my entry point into the job market, my first few serious opportunities that I got — I only got because I knew Flash very well, as a designer, as a developer, and even as an animator.
After I saw that it got me a good job, I repeated this formula with After Effects and then again with Figma, all of which got me better jobs by mastering those new tools.
But Flash wasn’t just a tool like After Effects is, it was really a platform, and since Adobe might be killing it off, I thought it would be fun to remember what Flash really was and what it could have been.
What Flash really is
Flash, at its heart, is a desktop program developed by Adobe (formerly by Macromedia) to make rich and interactive experiences for the web and more.
To this day, Flash is the only application that was able to perfectly marry these 3 products into one:
- A vector design tool
- A professional animation software
- An integrated development environment (IDE)
No matter the aspect that made one use Flash, as an animation tool, vector design or as an IDE it was still a marvelous tool, of course all three are not award winning experiences (I can hear the developers yelling about lousy debugging options) but they were all more than good enough.
Because of that Flash got to be so popular that at some point in late 2007 it was estimated that 50% of the internet was Flash-based, which meant that going online without a Flash Player (a small browser plugin that plays Flash frames inside HTML) was almost impossible.
Flash was so much everywhere that you could not browse the web without it, so much so that Steve Jobs had to release an open letter in 2010 defending Apple’s decision to not include Flash player on the iPhone, even though he insisted that the iPhone runs the ”real” web and not a baby version of it.
Big sites like YouTube, Newgrounds, Cartoon Network, Disney and many more relied on Flash as their primary technology for their online identity.
Even today, as technology got so advanced, it’s almost impossible to make an animated and scripted beautifully designed online interactive experience as we could make with Flash in 2005.
Today, the most talented human being who knows everything about design and development — would still need to know: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, GSAP, Figma and have a great sense of design and UX, to even remotely mimic the Flash capabilities from 20 years ago.
Not to mention Flash games, which were all the rage in the early 2000s but completely disappeared from the internet, right now it’s really hard to make an online game that run in your browser, much harder than it should be, as a result most gaming is now done in mobile apps and dedicated consoles.
What Flash could have been
If Adobe didn’t kill it, Flash could have been (and it was) a great tool for animation, many animation productions were using Flash as their main program, including My Little Pony, Teen Titans Go!, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends and The Powerpuff Girls.
Flash could also make mobile apps for both iOS and Android and, if Adobe had pushed it, it could have been a standard for cross platform app development, much like React Native or Flutter ended up being.
Adobe could also take Flash into the gaming industry, giving it more advanced 3D capabilities and rival Unity and Unreal Engine, coupling it with the cross-platform app building capabilities it already had could have been a dream.
Finally, I think Flash didn’t get to live to see the era of AI in its full glory, but Flash could have been rebranded and become a platform for tool building, as it is already a visual builder and a code editor, making it something new for the AI era.
When I think about more complex software like Unity, Xcode, Touch Designer and Blender, I can’t help myself from wondering how Flash could have fit in.
I understand Adobe’s decision to stop supporting it, even though I wish there was anything else that could replace it, I understand Flash had run its course and Adobe doesn’t need to spend more time and money maintaining it.
But it sucks, it feels like losing a friend, even though we weren’t keeping touch for the last few years, it still hurts to know it’s gone.
Still it’s amazing to see how many capabilities Flash had, not all of them included in today’s modern tooling, making a Figma prototype is in some ways more constrained and less fun that Flash ever was.
Building in AI tools like Lovable just hits different, somehow all these tools are quicker and work great for companies and corporations but for building alone in your bedroom — they feel less personal, less human than Flash was, too perfect, too polished.
Flash was a flawed program with many issues and security holes but it did democratized building for the web and online games in a way no other tool did.
And for that — I will miss it.
Thank you for reading.
Sources:
Thoughts on Flash / Wikipedia
Thoughts on Flash / Steve Jobs, 2010 (PDF)
Adobe Animate is shutting down next month / The Verge
Adobe Flash / Wikipedia
Adobe Animate / Wikipedia
Top 10 Best FLASH Cartoons / YouTube
A farewell to Flash was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.