Comment by egypturnash
10 hours ago
Approximately a quarter century of editor UI muscle memory in everyone who's used Flash/Animate professionally. And a quarter century of people being used to the precise quirks of how Flash/Animate organizes the parts for a cartoon. And a quarter century of source files in a private format that can only be read and understood by Flash/Animate.
Reminded me of this list of cartoons cerated with Adobe Animate (formerly flash)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...
Who has authored anything they actually cared about using Flash in the last 15 years?
I don't know Animate - is it basically Flash Updated (I've read here that Adobe kept some elements of Flash in Animate, but it is unclear what).
Also, there are non-Flash players for .fla files (not editors, however).
Animation studios. I know for a fact that Teen Titans was animated in Flash/Animate for its entire life, for instance; that’s directly from a former co-worker who was the animation director there. Lots of small productions, too. Animate is a lot cheaper than Toon Boom Harmony so tons of hobbyists use it.
The only difference between Animate and Flash is that SWF export got dropped eventually. And a haphazard smattering of new features got added.
You don’t play FLAs. You load them into the editor and output SWFs. Or various video formats. There are reverse engineered SWF players, most prominently Ruffle, but this is the first I’ve heard of anyone parsing FLA files.
FLA is the source format, it is to a SWF (or other video file exported from the editor) as a PSD is to a JPEG, or a .c file to an executable program compiled with all debug info off.
OK, my mistake on .fla vs. .swf ...
so the story is that Flash basically disappeared from the web, but evolved into a tool to do more general/extensive animation (Animate) that continues to be used today even though the output is (essentially) never .swf files? is that more or less correct?