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Reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated
Reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.
The ups and downs of Adobe Flash and it’s reborn incarnation as Adobe Animate.
Here at Soho Editors, we train all kinds of apps, software and such. One of the interesting benefits of this, is that we get a good idea of popularity trends; which applications are on the way out and which ones are coming into favour. One of those which tailed off to virtually never being trained in the past year, when I used to train people on it quite regularly, is Adobe’s Flash. But if ever there was a bit of software which has crawled out of the grave more times than a homesick zombie, it would be Adobe’s Flash. And wouldn't you know it? It looks like it might manage that yet again.
Around since the early Nineties, and having been through several name changes and tenures of ownership, Flash was eventually acquired by Adobe in 2005 when they bought its then owner, Macromedia, also getting Dreamweaver into the bargain as part of their evil plan to make every piece of software ever written part of the the Adobe Creative Suite of programs. Alright, I admit I'm making that last bit up about them being evil, but the rest is true. Originally a vector drawing program named Smartsketch, which first appeared in the early Nineties, Flash had animation capabilities grafted onto it not long after it was first developed. It was the addition of this animation capability which led to it proving popular for creating cartoons and browser-based games. As a result, Flash hitched its wagon to a star, being closely tied in with the advent of several successes: the birth of the internet; Microsoft’s MSN TV network; Disney’s subscription service and Fox’s iconic Nineties cartoon series, The Simpsons. Oh and the porn industry, they loved Flash too, although understandably, this is not the major… ahem… thrust, of Adobe’s advertising claims for Flash, for obvious reasons. After all, normally when we mention flashing and macs, it’s not computer animations we’re referring to. But I digress.
One might suspect that with a pedigree like that, and such a widespread user base, the only way would be up for Flash, and for a long while that was true, particularly as the internet became the massive, indispensable juggernaut we know it as today. But like every story, this one needs a villain to make things interesting, and there was one, well sort of… You see, Flash was written to make use of the number-crunching power of a desktop computer’s Central Processing Unit, but the advent of mobile web browsing on tablets and smart phones, most of which utilise the processing power of the Graphics Processing Unit, meant Flash was suddenly on the wrong road from a developmental and hardware standpoint. Couple this with the fact that Apple’s Steve Jobs was famously not a fan of the fact Flash’s SWF content requires a browser plug-in in order to work, and it is easy to see why, for a while at least, Flash appeared to be heading for an early grave. This would have been something of a shame, because regardless of what lies under under the hood, Flash itself has always been quite a nice tool for creating computer games and animations, even having a bit of 3D capability. Fortunately for us, every good story also has a knight in shining armour, and this one is no exception; Adobe were not quite ready to see Flash die, and so they sought a solution to try to save it. This initially came in the form of a plug-in, with the name Wallaby, which enabled Flash to export HTML code and Javascript, thus negating the need for it to use the plug-in dependent Shockwave Flash (SWF) format. With the advent of the CS6 and CC versions of Flash, Adobe included the Wallaby plug-in as an integral part of the software and Flash was renamed Flash Professional in order to reflect that change. Now you might think that our tale ends there, but every good story also has a bit of a surprise ending too…
Hooray! Flash was saved. Or was it? Well, unfortunately not, or at least not quite yet. You see, if you give a dog a bad name, it sticks, and in the case of Flash, there were so many people familiar with surfing the ‘net who knew that SWF files would result in your web browser popping up an alert message asking you to download or update your Flash Player Plug-In, which meant everyone got it in their heads that Flash was a dead duck. It didn't matter to them that Adobe had solved the problem, the damage was done. The solution? Drop the name Flash and call it something else, after all, it might have been called Flash for quite a while, but it had a couple of different names before that one, so changing its name was certainly not without precedent.
So, say hello to Adobe Animate; all the capabilities of good old Flash, including support for Action Scripting, but with the ability to export in all kinds of different formats, most importantly, HTML5 with Javascript, thus no need to rely on web browser plug-ins. But, if you are feeling nostalgic, it can still export to SWF if you really want it to. But why does this matter to you? Well, amongst the things I teach at Soho Editors, is HTML coding and scripting, but because I do that, I also know there are many creative types out there who find the idea of complex coding a daunting prospect, thus they are not interested in getting involved in learning it, yet they still want to be able to create nice visual web content. Animate is therefore just what they are looking for; a very Illustrator-esque program which will allow them to do that. Worth a look if you are someone who fits that profile.
Author - Alan Bradbury - Senior Adobe Instructor
Reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.
The ups and downs of Adobe Flash and it’s reborn incarnation as Adobe Animate.
Here at Soho Editors, we train all kinds of apps, software and such. One of the interesting benefits of this, is that we get a good idea of popularity trends; which applications are on the way out and which ones are coming into favour. One of those which tailed off to virtually never being trained in the past year, when I used to train people on it quite regularly, is Adobe’s Flash. But if ever there was a bit of software which has crawled out of the grave more times than a homesick zombie, it would be Adobe’s Flash. And wouldn't you know it? It looks like it might manage that yet again.
Around since the early Nineties, and having been through several name changes and tenures of ownership, Flash was eventually acquired by Adobe in 2005 when they bought its then owner, Macromedia, also getting Dreamweaver into the bargain as part of their evil plan to make every piece of software ever written part of the the Adobe Creative Suite of programs. Alright, I admit I'm making that last bit up about them being evil, but the rest is true. Originally a vector drawing program named Smartsketch, which first appeared in the early Nineties, Flash had animation capabilities grafted onto it not long after it was first developed. It was the addition of this animation capability which led to it proving popular for creating cartoons and browser-based games. As a result, Flash hitched its wagon to a star, being closely tied in with the advent of several successes: the birth of the internet; Microsoft’s MSN TV network; Disney’s subscription service and Fox’s iconic Nineties cartoon series, The Simpsons. Oh and the porn industry, they loved Flash too, although understandably, this is not the major… ahem… thrust, of Adobe’s advertising claims for Flash, for obvious reasons. After all, normally when we mention flashing and macs, it’s not computer animations we’re referring to. But I digress.
One might suspect that with a pedigree like that, and such a widespread user base, the only way would be up for Flash, and for a long while that was true, particularly as the internet became the massive, indispensable juggernaut we know it as today. But like every story, this one needs a villain to make things interesting, and there was one, well sort of… You see, Flash was written to make use of the number-crunching power of a desktop computer’s Central Processing Unit, but the advent of mobile web browsing on tablets and smart phones, most of which utilise the processing power of the Graphics Processing Unit, meant Flash was suddenly on the wrong road from a developmental and hardware standpoint. Couple this with the fact that Apple’s Steve Jobs was famously not a fan of the fact Flash’s SWF content requires a browser plug-in in order to work, and it is easy to see why, for a while at least, Flash appeared to be heading for an early grave. This would have been something of a shame, because regardless of what lies under under the hood, Flash itself has always been quite a nice tool for creating computer games and animations, even having a bit of 3D capability. Fortunately for us, every good story also has a knight in shining armour, and this one is no exception; Adobe were not quite ready to see Flash die, and so they sought a solution to try to save it. This initially came in the form of a plug-in, with the name Wallaby, which enabled Flash to export HTML code and Javascript, thus negating the need for it to use the plug-in dependent Shockwave Flash (SWF) format. With the advent of the CS6 and CC versions of Flash, Adobe included the Wallaby plug-in as an integral part of the software and Flash was renamed Flash Professional in order to reflect that change. Now you might think that our tale ends there, but every good story also has a bit of a surprise ending too…
Hooray! Flash was saved. Or was it? Well, unfortunately not, or at least not quite yet. You see, if you give a dog a bad name, it sticks, and in the case of Flash, there were so many people familiar with surfing the ‘net who knew that SWF files would result in your web browser popping up an alert message asking you to download or update your Flash Player Plug-In, which meant everyone got it in their heads that Flash was a dead duck. It didn't matter to them that Adobe had solved the problem, the damage was done. The solution? Drop the name Flash and call it something else, after all, it might have been called Flash for quite a while, but it had a couple of different names before that one, so changing its name was certainly not without precedent.
So, say hello to Adobe Animate; all the capabilities of good old Flash, including support for Action Scripting, but with the ability to export in all kinds of different formats, most importantly, HTML5 with Javascript, thus no need to rely on web browser plug-ins. But, if you are feeling nostalgic, it can still export to SWF if you really want it to. But why does this matter to you? Well, amongst the things I teach at Soho Editors, is HTML coding and scripting, but because I do that, I also know there are many creative types out there who find the idea of complex coding a daunting prospect, thus they are not interested in getting involved in learning it, yet they still want to be able to create nice visual web content. Animate is therefore just what they are looking for; a very Illustrator-esque program which will allow them to do that. Worth a look if you are someone who fits that profile.
Author - Alan Bradbury - Senior Adobe Instructor