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  cableshaft
  I made Flash Games back in the day. Here's my old profile on Newgrounds: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/One thing Flash had that nothing else has really seemed to replicate as well since, is an environment that both coders and artists could use. I'd collaborate with an artist, they'd make their animations within an FLA, send it to me, and then I'd copy+paste into the project file, and it'd just work. I could even tweak their animations if need be to remove a frame here or there to tighten the animations and make it feel more fluid, etc.That being said, I'm not sure I could go back to it now. I've been working with Love2D lately, and I prefer that (especially for the version control). FLA version control was always me going 'GameName-1.fla', 'GameName-2.fla', or when I got a little smarter 'GameName-Date.fla'. Eventually they let you split out the actionscript files into its own files, and that was better for version control, but you still had the binary mess of the FLA file.But all these sprite-based game editors just can't handle the crazy intricate animations that vector-based Flash games could handle. Porting one of my old games (Clock Legends) that had hundreds of frames of hand drawn animation for a boss that filled the screen would be ridiculously huge nowadays, but the FLA for that was like 23MB, I believe (I'll need to hunt it down, I have it somewhere), and several MB of that were for the songs in the game.Excited for this project though. It deserves to come back in some form.
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  random3
  I built a flash crawler to index all Flash while at Adobe. It started with Alexa top 1M I think then crawled. This was 2008-2010 I think so we had to do a lot of custom stuff, but we basically crawled then ran a headless Firefox with a custom headless Flash player that dumped a ton of data so also analyzed every flash at runtime and indexed all of that.We built a dedicated cluster in a colocation center in Bucharest to handle all of this. Had issues with max floor weights and what not. Then had to upgrade the RAM on on the cluster. No remote hands. Every operation was a trip to a really cold place.Used a lot of early stage stuff like Nutch, Hadoop, HBase etc. Everything was then processed and dumped to an SQL database with a nice UI on top. It took a few weeks to set it up, then we passed it to a team of interns that built the SQL database and UI on top. They learned a ton of stuff. Some are now in the Bay Area.The tool uncovered a ton of security issues.It was fun building it. I wonder if Adobe kept the data. It could be useful and/or good donation for the Computer History Museum.
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  tombert
  Heck yeah.I've said it a million times, but I stand by Flash being the most fun development environment ever made.Being able to draw your cartoons, make them a movie clip, export to code, edit things around without having to re-count all the frames, built in hit-detection, etc. It's a blast to write software for Flash, and I am not sure I've ever had more fun than being a teenager developing Flash games in my bedroom with a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004 Pro (or was it Flash 8? I can't remember).Now, I'll admit that part of that was because I was a teenager at the time, and programming was still a cool novel thing to me, but I do think that the platform was uniquely fun and interactive, and I have been chasing that high for awhile without being able to find something to fully replace it. Stuff like Construct and GameMaker and stuff are pretty cool and fun, but they still don't really hit the same for me that Flash did.If we can have a new Flash, I will be very happy.
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  HanClinto
  > .fla / XFL import — This is the one I’m most proud of. You can open your old Flash files. As far as I know, this is the only open-source tool that functions as a full authoring environment and can actually import .fla files. Not just play them back — edit them.The backwards compatibility here is pretty clutch. I agree -- if he can build something that is compatible with old files AND pushes things forward for new, then this could do some really awesome stuff.
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  spondyl
  This post raises a few flags in my mind that it was at least partly generated by an LLM? That isn't to suggest that this editor doesn't/won't exist, that the editor uses LLM-generated code (which is not a sleight) or that the claims are not truthful.The main things that jump out are the inconsistency in writing style (sometimes doing all lowercase and no punctuation) but then the brief rundown is all perfect spelling and grammar with em-dashes.The "Not just" parts stick out like "Not just play them back — edit them" as well as "This isn’t a proof of concept or a weekend project. It’s a real authoring environment."Anyway, best of luck to the author with their project!
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  pushedx
  Every so often over the past 15 years I've had this exact thought, "The world needs something which is exactly like flash. Not kind of like flash, exactly like flash."A whole generation of people learned how to create art, games, music, animations, using flash, and the same kind of tool hasn't existed since then.I think Minecraft and Roblox replaced flash for the new generations.
• thenthenthen
  Sadly the website is blocking me and also my vpn and also my 5g :(
• bouncyhat
  It makes me so happy to see this. When I was in high school Flash was THE way that you could practice programming games with the instant feedback of graphics animation, key input, and playing sound. I enjoyed it so much that out of college I joined the Adobe Platform team right around 2008. I worked in the SF office which was formerly the Macromedia HQ before Adobe bought them out.There were some really cool Flash tools in the works around then. Some internal developers had gotten some version of Flash Alchemy to run Doom in the browser. There was a lot of work going on to add proper GPU integration into the platform. I got to see some cool prototypes. Ultimately though, my timing was poor. This was right around when Steve Jobs decided that the iPhone shouldn't run Flash. The internal lore/rumor mill was that some PM had missed Steve Jobs reporting crashes in Safari enough times that Jobs was just DONE with Flash and had decided to kill it on his platform. I have no idea how true that was.There was a mad scramble at Adobe to try to figure out how to keep Flash running on the iPhone. The AIR team was actively looking into reverse engineering solutions so they could essentially deploy Flash apps that didn't look like they were written in Flash. They tried to rally the community with a "We <3 Flash" campaign. It didn't matter. Flash was taken off the iPhone and Adobe made the call to give up. In 2009 after a few waves of 2008 recession cuts they slashed a huge part of the platform team and I knew it was over.There were a lot of reasons that Flash probably needed to go, but I wonder about what the web would have been if it hadn't been killed around that time. Regardless I hope this project succeeds. <3 Flash.
• SonnyTark
  I thought about doing this for a while, I was a Flash gamedev as an indie then professionally.Back then, once Flash projects start to scale up to get more commercial/competitive, the flash editor is no longer as useful for development and transforms to an assets creation platform that outputs loadable SWF files.The code moves to use Air/Flex SDKs which were more or less equivalent to the tooling we nowadays get with Go/dotnet etc.So while Flash was an amazing expression tool for learners/hobbyists and is amazing for gamejams since assets creation is part of the workflow, it did hold devs back at higher levels of production.Many Flash devs moved to Haxe to continue creating on that platform and it managed to survive and thrive.
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  whywhywhywhy
  Think in this day and age starting your project off saying it's open source but making sure to open the patreon first and take money before the repo is a bad start when the reason for the project existing is a closed source paid product is being discontinued.Especially if the dev is working on a sound editor, something Flash doesn't actually need before even having an outputted example up and running or even a video of it working.
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  999900000999
  Unless this is open source I don't see the point.We can't trust closed source software for content creation tools.What happens when he gets bored?However, I LOVE C# and would totally be down to contribute if it's open source.
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  socalgal2
  I get that Flash hit a sweet spot. I'm not sure I get why nothing has really replaced it. There are other apps that give you animated vector graphics, in an IDE, with coding.Here's 2?https://rive.app/editorhttps://cavalry.scenegroup.co/I believe Unity doesn't do flash style vector animations. It will take in SVGs, turn them into meshes and apply skeletons. That said, it has replaced Flash in turns of the 1000s and 1000s of web games made with it.https://poki.com/en/unityhttps://itch.io/games/platform-web (majorty are Unity?)Fun history: There was a flash like (vector animation program) for the Apple II called Fantavision.https://youtu.be/8_Bm8bidrpE?t=40It would export executables IIRC.
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  alhazrod
  I wish Adobe had open sourced Flash - it really was a pretty amazing tool. They could have owned the proprietary developer tool market to support themselves...
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  IvanK_net
  In 2012, I created IvanK.js - a Javascript library with the "Flash API" for quickly remaking ActionScript 3 games into the web environment. But it required WebGL, which as not very well supported back then.I could remake several of my flash games quickly into web.https://lib.ivank.net/?p=demos&d=bitmaps
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  01100011
  I know very little about this space, but wasn't Haxe(https://haxe.org/) supposed to be a sort of next-gen, modern Flash replacement?
• kriro
  I never developed with Flash but my understanding is that "modern web" can do everything Flash was used for. So my understanding is that most useful thing is probably the .fla importer. Wouldn't it make sense to focus on authoring-tooling (animator+developer coop) and the importer but "export" to standard web tech?
• graypegg
  Exciting! But I can't seem to find any where I can take a peek. It looks like a lot of UI is at least there, and the post makes some big promises about what's already done.The vector icons in the side bar have the distinct cruft of LLM-generated SVGs, so just ideally hoping it isn't a quickly-made UI shell. The big claims about .fla import make me a bit skeptical. Though even so, we're not owed anything and I think it's a cool idea to share!
• vishnuharidas
  There were many study materials that were made in Flash that came back alive with the help of Ruffle. Here's my fav list: https://astro.unl.edu/animationsLinks.html
• pjmlp
  This is a very great idea, Flash authoring was gold, and we already had a class of games in 2010, that 16 years later WebGL/WebGPU still fail to repeat, in available games and development tools.
• Brajeshwar
  I personally believe that Flash has had its day and should die a Hero, rather than be resurrected to become a villain.For being open-sourced, it was a pretty hot topic, especially at an interesting gathering inside Macromedia in the summer of 2005. Little did we know (or kinda) that it was going to take a different path with Adobe that Christmas.Honestly, I think, Flash kinda died way before the iPhone was released.
• tw04
  It's not flash until it supports homestar runner.
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  Dectanable
  This is exactly the Ardour model (and what Aseprite did before their license change). It's a highly viable way to sustain a niche FOSS desktop app in 2026. Make the repo open source, but put a price tag on the official, signed binaries on the main website. The professionals who need this to get work done will gladly pay a fee to avoid spending an afternoon fighting with Avalonia dependencies and build environments. The starving students and FOSS purists can clone the repo and run the build scripts themselves.
• theanonymousone
  Isn't that Flutter, i.e. an exotic language plus skipping DOM and drawing into a canvas?
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  outlore
  For someone like me who never got the opportunity to play with Flash, what are some modern equivalents? Is it Rive or Three.js? Or even Godot Web?
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  noelfranthomas
  Don't know much about this space, just curious why build this when we have Rive, Spline, etc?
• intellix
  I think Rive is quickly becoming a good Flash replacement. They started with vector animation and timelines and then started adding components and coding etc.
• ivanjermakov
  New Flash that can't run in the browser?
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  AndrewDucker
  This doesn't make it clear how people will run the end products.Is it targeting the web? If not then it's not going to be useful for the same things as Flash was.
• phplovesong
  Haxe used to be the goto for Flash development. Maybe it could benefit a project like this too. I assume the target is AS5?
• ellg
  Whats the key difference between this and Rive? Especially now that Rive has full scripting support? Just curious more than anything, this does seem neat, especially the fla / xfl support (although for new things this doesnt seem like a huge killer feature)
• anon
  undefined
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  nickpsecurity
  I remember trying out Macromedia Flash 6.0. My GUI apps were ugly at the time. Learning to build something like I saw in the movies could take years. Then, Flash let me throw together beautiful, animated interfaces like it was nothing. One could do quite a bit after one tutorial.(Note: Quick shoutout to Dreamweaver 6.0 which was a power, WYSIWYG editor. Today, things like Pinegrow might fill the niche.)It's death as a hugely-popular tool was largely due to Apple and Adobe. SaaS model isn't helping it far as wide adoption goes. It also got popular through piracy which hints the replacement should be profitable and widely deployed like open source.I think this might be a good opportunity for a license like PolyForm Non-Commercial. Free users either can't commercialize their content or, like CompCert Compiler, must make the outputs GPL'd (or AGPL'd). The Flash replacement would have a fair, one-time price for unrestricted use with source or you share like they shared with you. What do you all think?
• DonHopkins
  Marc Canter (founder of MacroMind/MacroMedia) one explained to me something revealing about the Director timeline (their original product before Flash, later integrated with the web browser as Shockwave):It's essentially just a BASIC program rotated 90 degrees on its side, full of GOTOs.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35652164DonHopkins on April 21, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2...I love all the amazing inspirational open source examples of generative procedural art and artificial life that Jared Tarbell published on his web site https://web.archive.org/web/20070202025610/http://levitated.... .It opened my eyes to using Flash for procedural graphics and simulations, instead of just using timelines like a glorified graphical player piano, or like a BASIC program full of GOTO spaghetti rotated 90 degrees counter clockwise (which is how Macromedia founder Marc Canter described Director's Lingo, which also used frame numbers like BASIC line numbers).Jared went on to do a lot more amazing stuff in Processing, co-founded Etsy, and built a toy factory!https://www.artnome.com/news/2020/8/24/interview-with-genera...https://www.artnome.com/news/2018/8/8/why-love-generative-ar...https://beyondtellerrand.com/events/dusseldorf-2018/speakers...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_-9UWkgDf8
• ccppurcell
  The creativity and range of newgrounds content was mind blowing. The focus on fun as opposed to money making was really clear to me even as a kid. I've always had this little conspiracy theory that they killed flash because it was a threat, too easy for us to make our own culture and fun without a wealth extraction step in the middle. I know it's not true but it's just a weird little feeling I have.
• jezzamon
  Seems fun, I would've loved for this to be a web app though. Given flash is so tied to the web, it would be fitting if the editor itself worked like that
• immy
  Hype (YC W11) is for animators to produce HTML5 https://tumult.com/hype/
• alcover
  May the Gods be with him. The nostalgia is very strong. Opening Flash and start a new project was an immense source of joy to me in the 00's.
• Piraty
  there is electron already. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14087381
• agnishom
  I hope there is a feature that will let people export the artefacts to HTML5/JS.
• anon
  undefined
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  Retr0id
  It's impressive what people are able to vibecode these days!
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  agumonkey
  I wonder how much this would impact the react world
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  markstos
  But will there be a browser plugin?
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  purplejacket
  Sorry, but can someone explain to me why Flash failed? Was it because Apple killed it, or other reasons? Because not open source? Too heavy? I never really got the story, or only got bits and pieces. I know a lot of people liked Flash.
• phendrenad2
  If this ships, it'll fulfill the "editor" piece of the flash equation. We're still missing the "runtime" though (if we want that old flash feeling). We'll probably need to strongarm Google into supporting it in Chrome, but that's not impossible (especially with AI-enabled coding eroding Google's moat).
• cynicalsecurity
  I feel young again.
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  mock-possum
  I just noticed in a dev stream for Cult Of The Lamb that they were using .fla files, what a throwback. I remember those days well!
• luxuryballs
  Now THIS is Claude Maxing! /anakin-podracer-meme
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  LoganDark
  Article title could use capitalizing Flash -- I thought it was about NAND at first.