The death of Flash

(Re)Animate

When D.C. Comic’s superhero the Flash runs so mind-bogglingly fast that he seemingly dies, he enters another dimension — the Speedforce — wherein he turns into a lightning bolt and travels back in time.

In the origin of this story world, a young man named Barry Allen is working in a laboratory when a lightning bolt hits it, dousing him with chemicals that transform him into the Flash.

Yep: the lighting bolt that hits Barry’s lab is… Barry himself.

The death of Adobe Flash and the life of Adobe Animate is a little bit like that story. Perhaps Adobe should have named it (Re)Animate…

Flash is dead. Long live Animate!

In this reflection, read about the death of Flash — the app, not the superhero — before we explore its successor, Animate CC:

• From the perspective of a blog post in 2017: A brief history of Flash at Streamshark >
• 2010 | The opening salvo in the death of Flash: Steve Jobs’ open letter critique >
• 2017 | Adobe’s post concerning end-of-life for Flash: Flash and the Future of Interactive Content >
• 2017 | Wired Magazine’s analysis and history of the long, slow death: Adobe Finally Kills Flash Dead >
• 2017 | The Register UK’s article on a petition to open-source Flash > and the petition itself at Github >
• 2018 | In a race against time, BlueMaxima develops the Flashpoint game preservation project > 
• 2019 | Newgrounds announces the development of Ruffle, a Flash emulator, which several websites adopt to preserve Flash content >
• 2021 | Adobe implements a Flash kill switch on January 12, but is this the end of Flash? > 

There’s a TON of old high-quality Flash content out there. What is a favorite of yours that you miss having ready access to? My favorite Flash site, Understanding Duchamp by Andrew Stafford, is filled with insightful interactive content that is now only wonkily available through a combination of the Wayback Machine and Ruffle. None of the photographs seem to be archived, but the animations are lively and informative:

After reading

After reading, consider the following questions in a reflective writing post on your blog:

• Was Steve Jobs right to assert that Flash fell short in the transition from PCs to mobile devices? Was his decision to exclude it a self-fulfilling prophecy? Or did Adobe’s lack of willingness to address shortcomings seal Flash’s fate?
• Flash was replaced by Animate CC. Since it uses HTML5/CSS3/JS, is there even a need for interactive media authoring software outside of DreamWeaver? Old Flash users might be comforted by familiar legacy content categories like buttons and movie clips, and interface elements like asset libraries and timelines, but do these still make any sense now that Animate creates .html files? Or: do you think Animate CC might be more than just Zombie Flash? Is there a good reason to keep the timeline metaphor in the user interface (for example, the keyframe property in CSS being such a poor way to visualize time modulation)?
• The death of Flash shows us how ephemeral digital practice can be: years spent perfecting Flash workflow and ActionScript literacy (this being the scripting language for Flash) are now obsolete for many developers. How do you react when obsolescence is forced on you? Is there anything that is future-proof? Could even HTML/CSS/JS be vulnerable to replacement at some point? Is it a waste of time to learn anything if it is vulnerable to rapid demise? What about predictions that generative AI will basically replace web developers altogether?
• Should Adobe release Flash to the open-source community? Should we rely on emulators like Ruffle to keep SWF files alive? Or should we just abandon SWF to the Island of Misfit Software, and let preservation projects like Flashpoint simply archive the legacy of Flash so we can all just move on? 
• Maybe we should just stop worrying and play the helicopter game in HTML5?