I’m only familiar with Flash as a user, not as developer. I’m curious, what did Flash have, that you can’t readily do with JS and Canvas? Be as broad or specific as you like.
For me it was a combination of IDE that allowed very easily to merge different assets (text, vector graphics, sounds) with basic scripting and a timeline.
Now you kind of have to think in code, and architect the site as a whole, there's less creative impulse, or simply messing around to find something cool. This interactive messing around has to be visual, ideas should be easily copy-pastable, etc.
Because it was easy to experiment with the whole interactive media, and you didn't really have to worry about differences in player (no touch, no mobile, player was independent of browser), you could create wild stuff in very short amount of time, and everyone could play with it in the same way.
I loved Flash. Sure, it wasn't accessible, wasn't SEO-friendly or searchable or linkable, and had no future in mobile, but it was a magical creative canvas quite unlike anything available now.
Think there’s positives and negatives. Some of the stuff possible with canvas is amazing and wouldn’t have even been possible at all in flash really and it does integrate as a first class citizen on the page, doesn’t feel janky like flash did sometimes.
But on the other hand a 12 year old can’t figure it out in a week and ship an animation they made from scratch to the web.
I'd say the major advantage was you had an IDE that had a canvas to draw on, a visual timeline to aide your animation, tweening, powerful scripting - much like Swift, and compilation (ship a self contained SWF binary).
For me the canvas was powerful, I could use a wacom to draw, tween motion between frames and visualize the whole thing quickly with playhead scrubbing, and keyframe tweaking etc.
I don't miss Flash but it would be really interesting to see how it would be used in today's mature webscape.
The Flash interface is primarily visual. It looks more like a video editing app, with timelines and layers.
- Click button X, run Timeline 1.
- Click Button Y, run Timeline 2.
- Click X again, run Timeline 1 in reverse.
That made it far more intuitive for designers, who can prototype interaction design ideas themselves, instead of leaving it entirely to developers to implement.
The death of Flash led to the death of the creative web, because anything outside of the bounds of CMS templated content required developers to do everything from CSS, JS triggers and deployment. Even today, that workflow persists, but is worse, because creative works can't be bundled into a single executable file like what was possible w/ Flash . Designers now create something in After Effects, which then has to be compiled into code via Lottie, and implemented by a developer.
You could “draw” the whole website, create fairly complex animations and interactions, script everything, and then just publish it.
Now imagine what it means today to create a simple animation, export it to Lottie, incorporate that into a website and publish that. It’s a nightmare. And it’s nowhere near to what was possible with Flash.
lekevicius|4 years ago
Now you kind of have to think in code, and architect the site as a whole, there's less creative impulse, or simply messing around to find something cool. This interactive messing around has to be visual, ideas should be easily copy-pastable, etc.
Because it was easy to experiment with the whole interactive media, and you didn't really have to worry about differences in player (no touch, no mobile, player was independent of browser), you could create wild stuff in very short amount of time, and everyone could play with it in the same way.
I loved Flash. Sure, it wasn't accessible, wasn't SEO-friendly or searchable or linkable, and had no future in mobile, but it was a magical creative canvas quite unlike anything available now.
whywhywhywhy|4 years ago
But on the other hand a 12 year old can’t figure it out in a week and ship an animation they made from scratch to the web.
monkeynotes|4 years ago
For me the canvas was powerful, I could use a wacom to draw, tween motion between frames and visualize the whole thing quickly with playhead scrubbing, and keyframe tweaking etc.
I don't miss Flash but it would be really interesting to see how it would be used in today's mature webscape.
robertoandred|4 years ago
rchaud|4 years ago
- Click button X, run Timeline 1. - Click Button Y, run Timeline 2. - Click X again, run Timeline 1 in reverse.
That made it far more intuitive for designers, who can prototype interaction design ideas themselves, instead of leaving it entirely to developers to implement.
The death of Flash led to the death of the creative web, because anything outside of the bounds of CMS templated content required developers to do everything from CSS, JS triggers and deployment. Even today, that workflow persists, but is worse, because creative works can't be bundled into a single executable file like what was possible w/ Flash . Designers now create something in After Effects, which then has to be compiled into code via Lottie, and implemented by a developer.
josefrichter|4 years ago
Now imagine what it means today to create a simple animation, export it to Lottie, incorporate that into a website and publish that. It’s a nightmare. And it’s nowhere near to what was possible with Flash.