Flash, the learning experience — RIP.

Joe Castelli
Jul 27, 2017 · 3 min read

So Adobe recently announced the execution date for Flash. It’ll finally be actually dead in 2020. What was at one point the king of web interactivity in a pre-HTML5 world is now set to die. Having had a relationship with the platform in the past, I feel a need to say some words.

Like some, I learned to code before IDEs and drag-and-drop interfaces. But I’ll never forget the feeling of first creating an interface in VB.Net and putting code behind the various events that fired when your program ran.

It was pure magic. To spend time building what you see, then wire it all together under the hood… it was exhilarating for its time. I later learned HMTL/CSS, Java layout engines and the like, but the magic and simplicity of creating an interface in a more creative mindset, then switching mental gears to go into computer science mode felt like the future. It was so satisfying to make something I could take pride in so quickly. I could draw my buttons and fields, all the while envisioning what their click, focus and blur events would eventually do. But these interfaces were pretty ugly. Your app looks like all the rest of them, and not in a good way.

Fast forward a few years to when I first got my hands on an actual copy of Adobe Creative Suite, and a bit later started to tinker with Flash. I got to experience that feeling again. By now armed with new creative and technical skills, interacting with Flash’s timeline, creating symbols and animating even the hackiest artwork was so much fun. Then I could string it all together, manipulating the user experience with Actionscript 3.0.

I remember feeling like the world was mine. I could create a detailed Illustrator file and begin bringing it to life in mere minutes. This ubiquitous Flash thing could be used to do so much. I became an expert in AS3, memorizing every nuance and major bug. I made a custom video player, and envisioned all sorts of next big things. Shortly thereafter I learned of Steve Jobs’ famous take on Flash from a performance and practicality standpoint.

It didn’t take long for me to agree. I myself made some dreadfully bloated Flash apps. I eventually became an iDork, and developed an appreciation for things that just work. But I never forgot that blissful workflow. That joy of separately animating symbols, and adding so much more functionally with scripting. It really was such a unique developer experience for a jack-of-all-trades type such as myself.

I still can’t help but think that Flash, the DX, was hitting its stride just as Flash, the plugin was aging itself out. I began to wonder how Adobe might shoehorn the same DX to target HTML5 and JavaScript. Or even native desktop. It just felt that good to me. It felt like a true maker’s platform.

As far as I know, few, if any of the efforts to keep Flash alive in some form have succeeded. I worry that the marriage of creative and technical DX may have died a quiet death alongside Flash. That beginning in Photoshop or Illustrator and importing assets into an interactive timeline, animating individual components and gluing it all together with code is forever lost. What a magical experience that was. And I’m not sure people who were never Flash builders can even truly understand what the experience was like.

Taking a step back, I can see now this was primarily a learning experience for me. I gained some contextual understanding of what logical steps were necessary to create a web app with animations and such. I can now do all of these things with code and some static assets.

But I can’t help but wonder how Flash could live on not as some HTML5 targeting hodgepodge, but as an educational tool. Maybe the target platform is some Java sandboxed .jar file or something. Cut some kids loose on that IDE. Teach them the basics of scripting, tweening, organizing assets, creating assets, and just watch what amazing things they create.

Among all of the horrible things that came from Flash, it’s so easy to overlook the good. It’d be awesome to see the spirit of the platform live on in some way, even if only to teach how fun it can be to create anything you can imagine with your own two hands. Regardless, I’ll always look back fondly — past all the horrible Flash ads and full screen 100% Flash sites — at the sheer creative enablement of the platform and its tools.

Joe Castelli

Written by

Founder and coder @fermatadigital. @nodejs @reactjs @drupal @meteorjs are my favorite weapons. Also, metal drums. And just about all music.

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