A love letter to Flash

FLASH <3

If you don't know Flash, or only as the excommunicated browser plug-in: it was actually a vector graphic-, animation- and general multimedia technology not exclusively for the web and not invented by Adobe.

It initially took off because it did what browsers couldn't do, such as:

• Animation
• Vector graphics
• Transparency
• Blend modes
• Gradients
• Transformations such as rotation
• Embedded fonts (similar to web fonts)
• Video playback
• Scripting (JS was already a thing but terribly slow)
• Pixel level image manipulation
• ...the list goes on...

Flash could do all of that within the browser, at the cost of just a tiny free plugin.

Flash was a phenomenon: many websites updated to having tacky interactive Flash menus, games, banners. Even full Flash websites were a thing.

But

Of course all of that can be loved or hated.

I mostly want to discuss how Flash was great in ways that were probably not obvious to the end user: as the most versatile and accessible creative tool that probably ever existed in personal computing.

I won't go too deep into it how the world has also changed and put that sort of versatile creativity out of business. That's for a more dystopic post...

Logic

Flash has a peculiar logic that makes it very powerful but also... nearly impossible to explain without demonstrating. So just listing a few things that were great in my view:

• Technologies are not compartmentalized: it does not separate graphics, animation and script, rather glues them together into so-called "movie clips".
  
  
• It forces reusability. Not only that of imported resources, but all the movie clips / graphics imported or created from scratch within the project.
  
  
• Movie clips can be instanced within each other which makes it very easy to create multi-level hierarchies, such as bones for animation.
  
  
• Vector-based to the very core, vector graphics can be drawn, modified, sliced, animated inside Flash.
  
  

A few more peculiarities that I can't decide if they are benefits or I'm just simply used to:

• Everything is on a timeline and everything has a timeline. Even script are on a frame in a timeline, executed when the frame is displayed.
  
  
• Every timeline runs independently, even if displayed in the same scene.
  
  

Please know that there are MANY ways to use Flash and mine is very specific to me. E.g for some it's an animation only tool, and some wrote script only apps inside a single frame. I'm somewhere between these two.

Editor

Flash's strength was the editing software. It had a learning curve, sure, but it gave very easy wins early on, e.g. drawing assets freehand with mouse, and quite noob-friendly coding options (ActionScript 1 and 2).

There are/were definitely better technologies out there but I don't know of any being so inclusive with skill levels from noob to pro, being sort of a toy but having a career-building potential.

Versatile/synergy

So here is a bit of my story.

(In the 2000s) I was lucky enough to be fluent in Flash and I could quickly prototype any idea idea in it: graphics, animation, interatctions.

<-vs->

Today I am quite fluent in JS and Blender: I see an immediate path to creating what I want with those. I focus on the idea and I rarely have to think about the "how".

This is great, however, the two are not the same: now I have to compartmentalize my creativity to different technologies. I have my Blender projects, my web dev projects, design projects, and they occasionally meet up.

Within Flash there was no separation. Graphics, animation, code affected each other in spontaneous ways, and all of those could be created from scratch within Flash - so I was rarely taken out of the creative flow.

Today I don't know of a single tool as versatile as Flash was. [Of course, today I wouldn't buy into a proprietary technology either, but it was a different time, everyone used cracked software.]

I think for me the best replacement today would be Godot engine, which is I think worth reaching fluency.

Portable

Flash is most known as something web-embedded but Flash files (.swf) could be also played in a stand-alone Flash player and easily turned into Windows and Mac executables. They usually contained all resources within a single file so there was no need for packaging to .zip or installers.

Also beyond web use - it was common for multimedia CDs to have their executables made in Flash (or Director).

But the phenomenon that I find very important, is that Flash clips/games went "viral" just by being shared on USB sticks and through emails directly between people, their success wasn't dependent on a platform. This was a free flow of software sharing at its best! (Of course there was some corporatization around it, but nothing like today).

3D

Flash was originally 2D and it was a really cool challenge to create something 3D in it. I've learned enough about perspective and trigonometry to create basic, even textured 3D objects. They did not look better than PS1 but that was the charm.

Then Papervision3D became a thing, which is a 3D library for Flash and quite a step up, a lot of shader options and of course 100000 times better performing than my own code! And it could import 3D models, I think .obj and .dae formats. All that real time 3D in your browser, that was really the future!

But then... eventually Flash got built-in 3D support and 3D just wasn't so interesting anymore. There was just nothing to hack :]

Death (more like murder)

Flash had a million flaws but I think its complete, accelerated demise was fueled by business interests, not the advance of technology.

See - Flash was the last era of "democratizing" technology. One-person projects could take off and make a creator famous for their work, without being tied to a platform or ecosystem. It was possible that literally 100% of the success and income landed with the author! This of course couldn't go on. New technologies had to be designed with corporate control in mind and definitely not for portability.

I think it was Apple's anti-Flash campaign that seemed to make people forget the good times and suddenly say really bad things about Flash. The official narrative was that it had vulnerabilities and bad performance on iPhones so it won't be supported. But I think the real reason was that Apple couldn't own and control it and it didn't play nice with their new gadget which initially... well... sucked at everything (including Flash) - and it had to be propped up with marketing.

I think without this offensive to kill it off, the immense creative potential of Flash could have been transformed and survived in some way. E.g. moved away from its web plug-in past and turned into a game engine.

I completely know/agree that Flash had to go, especially from the web, it was flawed in many ways, incl. security. However I don't think we (creatives) ever got a true replacement and that's unfortunate!

Life

In many ways Flash is still alive.

Flash editor itself still exists I think as Adobe Animate (lazy to check and I don't care because it's Adobe subscription hell). But what's better is that Flash MX 2004 is super easy to obtain and run so just try it out! :D

I don't follow it these days but initially Pixi.JS was a very good Flash replacement, in its logic and capabilities.

Also check out flash archives such as flashpointarchive.org

Thanks for reading this all the way! Please let me know if I was way off about anything I'm happy to make corrections.