It's a pity SVG animation authoring tools never eventuated since it's an underutilized but useful native format. Though I know Blender allows for SMIL export via its Freestyle feature (the animation is effectively frame-by-frame only though, not leveraging SMIL's path interpolation/morph ability).
[1] (ignore the GIF-converted examples, the originals are lightweight and vector-based) https://airbnb.io/lottie/
As for the cause, I think it's not only that Flash is dead, but also that there are now many other easy options to create content including professional looking video and much more refined animations. That wasn't an option 20 years ago for most.
Most of the time, it's far better: boring works. Boring pays the bills. Boring gets more people to use something. Boring is ubiquitous.
Everything "new" eventually becomes "boring" - and that's good
I've been online for just shy of 30 years
Can't say I've seen a "better" internet in terms of aesthetics ever
You’re saying boring is popular which goes against the principles of aesthetics. People think pretty things are better quality. You do too.
Boring gets forgotten and replaced. Boring is not ubiquitous.
Notice how zed Shaw tried that quixotic ugly website trend. Supposedly that’s what the world wanted. The world ignored it.
I know what you mean tho. Boring refers to old tech vs new hype. The issue is they used the word “boring” to denote “mature” software, and that’s where it all went wrong.
Bad form.
some people think pretty=better quality
I am not one of them - I think better quality=better quality
>Boring gets forgotten and replaced. Boring is not ubiquitous.
Boring is ubiquitous - Diesel engines are boring. Diesel engines are ubiquitous. Apache is boring. Apache is ubiquitous. Wordpress is boring. Wordpress is ubiquitous. Reinforced concrete is boring. Reinforced concrete is ubiquitous. iOS is boring. iOS is ubiquitous. 1/4-20 bolts are boring. 1/4-20 bolts are ubiquitous. SQL is boring. SQL is ubiquitous.
Boring doesn't get "forgotten and replaced" - it gets used by everyone everywhere ... the very definition of "ubiquitous" :)
Boring doesn't equal "ugly" - that you think it does seems to speak to your lack of understanding of the nature of engineering: engineers love "boring" because boring works. Boring is reliable. Boring lets you build bigger things because all those boring things Just Work™
Everyone likes prettier things. You need to prove that it’s not. Where’s your proof?
You’re making up your own definition of boring. It’s just a bunch of talking points I’ve heard forever.
I’ve read the same stuff you did. But nobody outside of tech could call diesel “boring” tech
Thank you for agreeing that my definition of boring is commonplace
The big problem is it was proprietary and the cost of entry was high at a time when I was short of cash for quite a few years.
Still, I wish I'd invested in learning it back in the day, as I really only came to appreciate its benefits after its fate was effectively sealed by Steve Jobs: could have made some good money whilst having some good fun doing it for 8 or 10 years up to around 2010.
(Of course, I would have had to deal with the consequence of my skillset being obsoleted seemingly overnight, but I got kind of a taste of that from the Microsoft ecosystem as well: it's WinForms, no, it's WPF, no it's Silverlight, no, etc...)
Re-reading Apple’s “Thoughts on Flash” tonight, I was surprised at how many times Apple mentioned vendor lock-in. JavaScript is definitely here to stay. Ten years later, though, I wonder if we have ended up in nearly the same place we strived to avoid - high power consumption - but with worse authoring tools. But with at least open standards, which are good.
I figure the magic moment will occur when some tiny startup builds friendly authoring tools on top of a tight runtime à la Decker. Like HyperCard/Director/Flash it’ll only get you 66% there, but that will be enough for many folks. Hackers. Hobbyists. Students. Tiny companies, and guerrilla departments.
The challenges will be preventing feature-itis, keeping it embeddable / avoiding JS library dependencies, and making it at least free-as-in-beer with an open format. I know there’s space for such a thing. My money’s on some lean 5-person startup with strong opinions.
Adobe still has the editor as Adobe Animate - if they made it more widely available, I think there is a big demographic of designers that would like to make a bit of animation or active graphics that is not being served any more.
This might be partially a fashion thing: people want the flashy interactions less. I for one appreciate some boring text with minimal animation! Also away from games where animated interaction is part of the point, designing a good animation that works better than text+images is often not as easy as many think, and you need to contend with that before you attempt to implement the design.
As there are less people wanting to make the animations the tools that would have replaced the tooling for flash (but outputting SVG+JS instead), of which there were a fair few in active development at one point, have languished unloved and incomplete – so not only do fewer people want to make such animations but those that do want to don't have easy tooling to do so.
There are a couple of e-learning sites out there using interactive animations to illustrate their points, one often has sponsor spots on a couple of podcasts & video series I follow though I forget its name ATM. I wonder what tooling they use, if any (though I doubt it is all manually coded).
The places where "animation that works better than text+images" is incredibly small
I can read faster than you can animate - speed it up!
Or I want to read longer than you animate - slow it down!
Text (+images) solves this perfectly - and has for millennia
If that wasn't enough time to move on, I don't know what to tell you :)
Laughably, they claimed this was ethical to prevent users from accidentally running insecure versions after they stopped patching.
I can still install Basilisk and run HyperCard stacks I wrote 30 years ago, but I can't run the dozens of games I wrote in Flash. It destroyed a good chunk of my life's work.
So your comment is rude. It's fine to move on and work in other languages, as I have, but to not be able to even show 80% of your portfolio because it was intentionally crippled by the company you rented the software from that you used to make it, isn't something you can move on from. It's been disastrous.
It's no different than what happened when the C64 when the way of the dodo
Or folks who built stuff for DOS, and never updated to Windows
Technology moves on
Languages and platforms get deprecated and/or die
And if "80% of your portfolio" is on a now-dead platform, I'd say it speaks more to you not wanting to do something new than that you happened to build a bunch of stuff on something now dead
I get that it sucks that stuff drops out of support/manufacture/etc
But it happens
You can be sour about it, or realize it's the nature of life, and move ahead :)
Doesn't the animation tool still exist just not under the name "flash"?
My understanding is that the free browser plugin to view the animations that got killed, but the the actual animation software that was used to produce them got bought by adobe and is still widely used to produce animations, it just doesn't have the option to produce swf files anymore (and even during the flash plugin era it was also being used to produce animations for tv, etc.).
I used to work with a group that created training materials using Flash. We had a bunch of animators that knew nothing about coding, but they could produce all of these amazing animated videos using Flash.
They could also produce interactive animations. One job we did was creating 3d renderings of printers. The printers could be torn down in the flash app to the smallest screw. A technician could choose what they wanted to do to the printer, and the flash movie would show them step by step in full animation what to do. At any time they could rotate the printer in all an axes to view different angles. It was amazing. And it was animators who knew nothing about code that built it all. The things they could do you just don’t see anymore.
I remember another project we worked on that had these mini games you could play in place of being multiple choice quizzes.
All of that is just gone. There was so much animation and interaction and fun that has been replaced with boring, text, images, and videos.
The best part was, it was all vectors, so the file sizes for even long animated movies was incredibly small. Back in those days we had very low bandwidth, but flash worked great. We had retailers in Asia that consumed our content no problem. Now our content is mostly text, images and videos. Those same retailers have higher bandwidth, but really struggle because the files sizes are enormous compared to flash.