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Headline is out of date. They changed their plans. From the link:

> We are not discontinuing or removing access to Adobe Animate. Animate will continue to be available for both current and new customers, and we will ensure you continue to have access to your content. There is no longer a deadline or date by which Animate will no longer be available.

I am glad to see that they’re backing off from discontinuing. I would really, really like it if they would let me buy it outright instead of subscribing.

I’ve mentioned this on here before, but I stand by it: developing Flash is the most fun way I have found to program.

Now, part of this is because Flash was one of the first things that I learned to program, so it’s probably a big rose-tinted because i was younger and it was new, but even as a thirty-something I still have had a blast playing with Flash MX Pro (legally acquired, of course).

Flash is so interesting to me, because it is animation first, but the programming was bolted on pretty elegantly. You could animate something using professional tools, highlight it, make it a movie clip, and immediately export it to code and hack against that. Yeah it was hard to maintain for big projects but it was fun how quickly 15 year old tombert could go from a few drawings to a simple game.

I miss it.

Notice that it's still very much possible to produce SWF files with languages like Haxe http://haxe.org/, and there are frameworks that mimic the Flash drawing API like OpenFL https://www.openfl.org/, there is (or was) a lot of interesting stuff like that happening around.

I had a start programming and doing little weird animations back in the early 2000s. Then I could earn a living doing stuff with Actionscript, little games on the web, or profile picture generators; even stuff on the BlackBerry PlayBook, which had support for AIR runtime. I made games with Flash and Actionscript until ~2015. Newgrounds even holds a jam called Flash Forward, in which you submit Flash games https://www.newgrounds.com/collection/flash-forward

I stopped using Flash long before it became Animate. I'm really sad to see it go, and that Adobe has so little love to this important piece of the web and the Internet.

Discontinuing is fine, the egregious part is not open sourcing it. Huge swathes of internet culture in terms of both story telling, animation and games is locked up in this system they have no interest in.

Either it has value and shouldn't be open sourced in which case why not keep developing it.

If it has no value whats the excuse not open source it as a sign of good will for artists and developers to invest time in your ecosystem, otherwise the message is "If you build with our apps and systems you will be locked out of your work forever when its an inconvenience for us, even if you're paying us hundreds a year"

i cant say i miss flash though. it was abused to hell, and the player was a total abomination. perhaps the best thing steve jobs did for the world was kill it off.

this also just goes to show that its reckless to base all your software on a closed platform like that. Sooner or later it will come back to bite you

Weird coincident.. last I week I installed "Flash MX 2004" in linux using wine. Works flawlessly! Gonna make some cool shit for "newgrounds flash forward 2026"

I would love my kids to have access to Flash and learn to build games the way I did. Unfortunately, £32.98/month for Animate is just too expensive.

As far as I know, there is nothing comparable to the Flash experience on the market.

Some more earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46859732

If AI is all the thing people keep saying someone should be able to develop an Animate/Flash clone, right? Given the reaction to its discontinuation, how people seem to depend on it, and how much content is out there it seem like the incentives do exist.

For a brief time in the early 2000s, there were no words more embarrassing than "skip intro"

There’s a LOTof deeply angry people in YouTube saying how much the hate Adobe for this little show.

They could have at least offered some legacy version for file access

"We are not discontinuing or removing access to Adobe Animate. Adobe Animate is in maintenance mode for all customers."

https://www.reddit.com/r/adobeanimate/comments/1qv5yju/updat...

What workflows (similar or any modern practices) exist today - would anyone share their workflow for html/html5/canvas, etc.