A lot of people - including studios who use it for projects that can take years to complete - were very unhappy at the prospect of having the only tool that can read their mountains of FLA files (the file format the Flash/Animate editor uses, and used to compile into a SWF) stop working because Adobe turned off the auth servers. Adobe has pulled back to "okay we're, uh, putting it in maintenance mode, expect no new features, ever, just security patches".
If you follow their mea culpa link, it says they're keeping (a type of) support.
> Adobe Animate is in maintenance mode for all customers...
> Maintenance mode means we will continue to support the application and provide ongoing security and bug fixes, but we are no longer adding new features.
Of course, in my experience, such a lifeline never lasts much longer than the furor that earned it...
Yeah, if I was in a Animate studio I sure would be putting some energy for the entire last month into finding a good crack for it so we could deal with our old files, and talking about our plans for how to deal with the major hit the production pipeline would take when we picked a new animation program and started retraining everyone on it.
A lot of people made the choice to use proprietary tools for their creative work flow, rather than making do with and pushing for better open source equivalents.
I have some sympathy for them - I am sure they felt it was the only real choice at the time - but not a whole lot.
There were zero open-source options at the time. Flash/Animate was the only digital ink-n-paint solution that was even vaguely affordable to the hobbyist or small studio for many years. Most studio-quality 2D programs were proprietary solutions developed in big studios like Disney.
People started using Flash for professional work around 1995. "Open source" barely existed as a concept then, Wikipedia tells me the name "open source" was coined in 1998 and it took a while before anyone but programmers gave even half a damn about it.
The first open-source studio-quality 2D animation package I know of was OpenToonz from 2016, which was a relicensing of a commercial package that dates back to the late eighties or the early nineties - Wikipedia just mentions v3 from 1993.
But anyway now there is a dude working on an open-source Flash clone that can read the editor source files, so all these people you have next to no sympathy for have something to celebrate.
Which they have recently said they will be dropping all support for: https://community.adobe.com/announcements-539/adobe-animate-...
A lot of people - including studios who use it for projects that can take years to complete - were very unhappy at the prospect of having the only tool that can read their mountains of FLA files (the file format the Flash/Animate editor uses, and used to compile into a SWF) stop working because Adobe turned off the auth servers. Adobe has pulled back to "okay we're, uh, putting it in maintenance mode, expect no new features, ever, just security patches".
If you follow their mea culpa link, it says they're keeping (a type of) support.
> Adobe Animate is in maintenance mode for all customers...
> Maintenance mode means we will continue to support the application and provide ongoing security and bug fixes, but we are no longer adding new features.
Of course, in my experience, such a lifeline never lasts much longer than the furor that earned it...
Yeah, if I was in a Animate studio I sure would be putting some energy for the entire last month into finding a good crack for it so we could deal with our old files, and talking about our plans for how to deal with the major hit the production pipeline would take when we picked a new animation program and started retraining everyone on it.
A lot of people made the choice to use proprietary tools for their creative work flow, rather than making do with and pushing for better open source equivalents.
I have some sympathy for them - I am sure they felt it was the only real choice at the time - but not a whole lot.
There were zero open-source options at the time. Flash/Animate was the only digital ink-n-paint solution that was even vaguely affordable to the hobbyist or small studio for many years. Most studio-quality 2D programs were proprietary solutions developed in big studios like Disney.
People started using Flash for professional work around 1995. "Open source" barely existed as a concept then, Wikipedia tells me the name "open source" was coined in 1998 and it took a while before anyone but programmers gave even half a damn about it.
The first open-source studio-quality 2D animation package I know of was OpenToonz from 2016, which was a relicensing of a commercial package that dates back to the late eighties or the early nineties - Wikipedia just mentions v3 from 1993.
But anyway now there is a dude working on an open-source Flash clone that can read the editor source files, so all these people you have next to no sympathy for have something to celebrate.
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