When you had an idea you could be switching back and forth from code to animation constantly, you didn't have to alt-tab or export anything. There were problems associated with it when it came to scalability and organization, but again, just very fast to work with, very accessible, and lent itself to a certain way of thinking about prototypes that had some big advantages. The fact that the content/animation and coding were so synchronized was a different way of thinking about architecture. a content-first workflow: related to the above, Flash let you switch between coding and content very quickly without worrying about stuff like imports. Doing stuff like point-and-click games with that workflow was so fast and easy, and it was so easy to build up animations with a lot of disparate parts. I can't begin to describe how great it was for programming to be able to embed code inside of animation, and have the entire thing be a clip that could be embedded inside another program. This is the biggest thing I miss when I open programs like Aseprite. It also opened up some workflows with AS2 that were not particularly scalable, but that were excellent for fast prototyping.

nested animations/clips: The recursive nature of Flash made making animations very fast. There's also complications based on how PWA get deployed to mobile, etc.īut ignoring all of that, here's a quick list of (some) categories of things I still miss from Flash: In theory, Adobe Animate still exists today, but it's wildly inaccessible both because of cost and its proprietary nature.

Flash player emulator online