> I agree with you that it's a little sad that amateur animation fell a bit out of vogue, but the tools are right there for anyone whos interested to pick up.

I have memories of being wowed by what creative people could do with flash in the 90s and I would not call that amateur animation. I think the problem (1) is we currently seem to be lacking in tools that let people skilled in the visual arts create things without knowledge of the mechanics, so to speak. It's like if in order to write a great song someone would first have to understand how a musical instrument is built. I would not call Amanda Palmer or Lee Ranaldo amateur yet I bet they probably can't build their own instruments.

(1) I must make the disclaimer that for a couple of decades already I've been working only on the backend, so I may surely be missing part of the picture here.

Edit: Fixed footnote mark.

amateur as in non professional/commercial. people not in for profit trades.

Amateur meaning lover. Someone who does something for the love of it and not the money.

Makes sense then. My wrong for forgetting that definition of the word when reading your comment.

To be fair, there were reasons those things fell out of favor; there was a real tendency for crazy, uneditable code that was way larger than it needed to be. Perhaps some of these things would be less of an issue now (honestly, a bunch of wasteful code is less of an issue now than when most of us were on 56k modems), but they weren't made-up.

Absolutely, my first link was 2400 so I know exactly what you mean :)

And I know there are still issues. Given today's speed, issues are more about security and accessibility.

My point was just that the artists using flash to create good content were not amateur animators.

Edit: My point was wrong as it was based on a misunderstanding of the use of the word 'amateur' by the person I was replying to.

The only good content in Flash was games and animations (like Homestar Runner). If you were using Flash as a Web/application design tool, you weren't making good content. You were making a pain in my ass.

Still waiting here for ADP and weather.gov to get their shit together and enter the 21st century.

What Flash content does weather.gov have? Their website visually appears a bit outdated, but it works just fine.

The looping radar views use flash [1] [2]. The composite regional radar loops don't though [3]. That is unfortunate because the former has more information and detail. There's no reason why it can't be reimplemented with canvas or SVG to manage the overlays.

[1] https://radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid=buf&product=N0R&over...

[2] https://radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid=BUF&product=N0R&over...

[3] https://radar.weather.gov/Conus/northeast_loop.php

I suspect a lot of early internet amateur animators got started on pirated/shared versions of Flash. Probably helped the proliferation of that scene a whole lot. Cloud based service models make that much harder.

$20.99 for all of creative suite is also a much lower entry point price.

Things may have changed for today’s teens, but having been a teen through the 00’s that would’ve been too expensive for me. It was hard to even justify a WoW subscription at $15/month even with the near endless entertainment value that provided. Also, with the CC subscription setup, if you stop paying you lose access to your creations. That’s not too big of a deal for working adults, but for a teen with tumultuous cash flow, it’s a huge dealbreaker.

I spent hundreds of hours in Photoshop as a teen, but I likely would’ve have bothered with it at all if it weren’t easily piratable.

12-14 year olds aren't going to be dropping 250 bucks a year. If you look at something like newgrounds, a lot of that was bored teenagers.

Depends on where you live in this World. For young people here (south america) that could be a lot.

That's a problem generally with cloud services. Pricing is mostly done considering some countries and contexts, but totally ignoring other. With physical equivalents some years ago, local distributors made deals with their home offices to adjust for this, but that's not something usually done anymore.