There are a lot of bad things about Flash, but it still has not been adequately replaced. AFAIK there is nothing web-centric that comes close to the developer experience it offered.
Yes, things can be pieced together: animation programs and sprite exporters here, some custom scripting there, throw in your own tween, sound, and networking libraries, etc., but this is much less efficient than a unified write-once, run-anywhere platform with an integrated development environment for all aspects of the content, which is what Flash offered.
That meant that Flash didn't really do any one thing exceptionally well, but it provided a way to reason about the program as a cohesive whole, and from a very visual perspective. I think that opened doors for a lot of people and I think the simplicity made it a productive platform.
I am no Flash fanboy, but there is a reason it was so popular, and we're ignoring that with the HTML 5 platform, which ultimately just leaves an opening for a new Flash imitator (Unity is the leading candidate, though it hasn't really broached web in a major way yet), which means we will repeat this cycle over the next 20 years.
No, I'm aware of that. Animate's HTML 5 export only exports the animations (in a relatively simplistic manner), leaving all of the logic and interactivity in the dust.
That's a big change. It downgrades Flash from an all-in-one development solution to a single piece of the art pipeline. Users are left to their own devices to try to figure out everything else.
Yes, things can be pieced together: animation programs and sprite exporters here, some custom scripting there, throw in your own tween, sound, and networking libraries, etc., but this is much less efficient than a unified write-once, run-anywhere platform with an integrated development environment for all aspects of the content, which is what Flash offered.
That meant that Flash didn't really do any one thing exceptionally well, but it provided a way to reason about the program as a cohesive whole, and from a very visual perspective. I think that opened doors for a lot of people and I think the simplicity made it a productive platform.
I am no Flash fanboy, but there is a reason it was so popular, and we're ignoring that with the HTML 5 platform, which ultimately just leaves an opening for a new Flash imitator (Unity is the leading candidate, though it hasn't really broached web in a major way yet), which means we will repeat this cycle over the next 20 years.