Vegas is great, but as far as I'm aware there's not really a way to get it running on Mac, and I don't own a Windows computer anymore (I still will VM it if I really need it). For my video stuff I've been using Final Cut Pro and Apple Motion for the last couple years since it's a one-time purchase and I think pretty good. I'd like to use Premiere and After Effects but, as stated, I don't want to pay for subscriptions.
I don't know enough about photo editing to say if GIMP sucks, I've used it before and it seems fine.
I wish they'd release a Mac version, because that was actually my favorite video editor on Windows. It would be really great if they made a Linux version but I'm not holding my breath for that.
If it were opened up, it could have been integrated directly into browsers and maybe even the web standards. The Flash desktop program would still probably be the de facto means of creating Flash content but at that point it could have conceivably still been on iPhone, at least eventually.
It's easy to blame Apple for this stuff, but fundamentally Steve Jobs' complaints were fair and I think it was a matter of "when", not "if" Flash was going to die.
The death of Flash kind of makes me sad. A lot of HTML5 stuff feels like it's playing this huge game of catchup from what we had in Flash in 2004, and I still think that Flash was one of the most fun development platforms ever; the ease of quickly going from "drawing" to "animation" to "code" was so streamlined and as a teenager I had a lot of fun with it, and I haven't found a tool since then that I've had as much fun playing with.
It's easy to blame Apple for this stuff, but fundamentally Steve Jobs' complaints were fair and I think it was a matter of "when", not "if" Flash was going to die.
No doubt there was a never ending litany of security problems, but if Flash had been available at the birth of smartphones, I suspect it would have flourished. Or even led to a competitor targeting the same space with better characteristics.
I think it might have been able to live on in the form of Adobe AIR if Adobe hadn't given up on it. I think AIR could have occupied the space that Electron does now.
Years of incremental improvements on this bustling platform could have made Flash into a performant beast.
Anyway, we will never know what could have been if Flash had been a mobile option on day one.
The runtime definitely needed to be improved, but I feel Flash gets a bit more hate than it deserves. By the tail end, there was even decent 3D graphics support, and CrossBridge was a pretty cool predecessor to Emscripten that allowed you to convert C++ programs into SWF stuff (IIRC an early version had the Doom engine ported over).
Having first MTASC and then the as3 compiler on the command line was another route into modern-day build pipelines. The 3D engines were great, Box2D port was great, and looking at it all now in 2024, the APIs still hold up and Adobe could restart an entire multimedia division with it.
Correct, and that might have been the single greatest gift Apple has bestowed upon the open Internet. Flash was the walled garden of the web — closed source, proprietary and a perennial security nightmare — and the community owes Apple a huge debt for gratitude for hastening its demise.
I know some people have fond memories of flash games, flash art and, in some instances, Flash websites. I do appreciate that it was a cultural moment. I do appreciate that it was accessible to novices and artists in a way that HTML5 is not. But the web is not, and should never have been, reliant on a closed source proprietary platform.
Sure Apple is to blame partially for Flash, but even now they rarely add new features to "Animate". There are other applications out there that are doing more interesting things.
Dreamweaver has been outdone by visual studio code and sublimetext, granted it was really only good for ColdFusion.
Fireworks was left to die, oddly enough it could of been the next Sketch, although Figma probably would of beaten it eventually anyway
Freehand was killed to let Illustrator be dominant
Safari barely ran on the first gen iPhone. If you scrolled too fast, it would display a checkerbox while the rendering caught up. It didn’t even have enough memory to have a background image on your Home Screen.
When Flash finally came to mobile in 2010 on Android, it required 1Gb RAM and 1Ghz processor and it barely ran. I had an HTC that met those specs. The first iPhone that met those specs didn’t come out until 2011.
Adobe was always over promising and under delivering on Flash for mobile to the point where the Motorola tablet that advertised flash support didn’t ship with it and embarrassingly enough, you couldn’t even view the Xoom’s home page on the web with the tablet because it required Flash.
I have to work with Adobe Experience Manager and it's a weird, painful, slow/inefficient kludge, not to even get into the licensing terms and what devs are "allowed" to do on their own servers.
Acrobat Reader stands out in my memory only as that extremely slow, bloated thing you launched by accident, then closed 5 minutes later once it loaded to use Sumatara instead.
They killed Flash by neglect after buying it from Macromedia - we might still have it around if they invested in it properly and made it up to par for the iPod. Thankfully we finally have good emulators that work in the browser to see the vast amount of old Flash content.
Creative Suite is fine and mostly functional from what I hear, but they didn't make that codebase either, and I've never felt limited by free or cheaper alternatives like GIMP or Sony Vegas. (I find it baffling how people rag on GIMP - I use it in a professional and personal capacity and I love it, and I'm familiar enough with Photoshop to compare it.)