Flash was an amazing creative interactive development platform, it was a ton of fun. Creatives designers and developers could create some amazing projects with it because it is very approachable. Flash provided a place for people to create games, web shows/cartoons, eventually video and with almost no limits except creativity. The compression and optimization of Flash was unmatched in the early days. The vector based nature of Flash was fresh and was also an excellent drawing tool. All this combined attracted a special type of creative designer/developer and some unique platform progression pushing innovation.

The community from Flash 4 (late 90s) / AS2 to FlashDevelop + AS3 (2007/8) was very fun to be a part of. AS3 was big and was based off of ES4, it really kickstarted Javascript development as well into overdrive. Everything big early on the web was Flash, From Joe Cartoon to Stain Boy to Praystation to Papervision which inspired three.js to gaming sites like Newgrounds and Kongregate and more. Flash pushed WebGL in the browser and HTML5/Canvas/video. Flash made the web interactive and fun. Flash was apps before mobile apps. While there could be overuse of Flash intros, on the flipside some of the most amazing game, video and interactive experiences and platforms started with Flash. Promotional games and game sites in Flash were huge pre-mobile.

Flash revolutionized video and made Youtube possible. Video was a mess before it. Both Flash and eventually Silverlight pushed innovation in this area leading to H.264 and HTML5 video capabilities. Flash was during a time where developers with plugins were pushing trends in the browser, not large corp.

Still to this day it is hard to recreate all the features of Flash with web standards but Flash was the plugin that pushed us forward the most on the web. The self-contained platform nature of Flash allowed focus on the app/game/interactive content and less fighting with technology, it was almost like an early console. Flash could do web requests/services before AJAX, so for a time it was the way to do web apps. I'll miss plugin innovation that was always ahead of standards. I will miss innovation on the web from Flash and the access that plugins had to push forward.

Flash was very well run when Macromedia ran it. Adobe bought it mainly for the video platform and to take competitors to Photoshop/Illustrator off the market in Macromedia Fireworks/Freehand. Adobe let both Director and Flash wither and did not react to hardware/software rendering soon enough. If Macromedia had kept in the game it might have gone differently. The period where Silverlight and Flash were competing was also quite nice, just before the mammoth mobile arrived in 2007/8 that changed everything. Smartphones revolutionized apps/interactives and game development, leading to a new handheld gaming/app platform that attracted most if not all Flash developers.

I got started in interactive development and game development professionally with Flash in the mid to late 90s. The release of Flash 4 was the beginning of a decade plus of massive innovation, pushed mostly by Flash. I made my first professional game in 2000 and did Flash games/interactives for a decade+. Now I do Unity, Unreal, WebGL/three.js and others for apps/games/web. Flash allowed me to work at agencies and helped the leap to professional game development. Unity/Unreal and WebGL became the places that most people in Flash ended up who were focused on games/interactives.

Adobe should have moved faster with Adobe AIR and HTML5 support as well as native/hardware acceleration, ultimately the slowness on mobile let it slip, the browsers blocking plugins pushed Flash from the web. Amazing creative designers and developers ended up either doing Unity games/apps/interactives or WebGL/canvas/three.js games/apps/interactives.

OpenFL [1], Haxe[2] and Lime [3] with FlashDevelop [4] is still out there for Flash development. In terms of empowering people to learn technology and see immediate results it is still a great platform.

Adobe Animate CC (renamed from Flash) is still great for animation, most large animated shows use Animate/Flash [5] or ToonBoom. One of the earliest exciting things about Flash was the ability to create cartoons and shows online, it is still one of the best tools for that and most popular animated shows use it that are 2D based. Flash being vector based really helps out for animation and scaling. For animated shows, there isn't another tool that comes close yet, Flash is still king in 2D animation.

[1] https://www.openfl.org/

[2] https://haxe.org/

[3] https://lime.software/

[4] https://www.flashdevelop.org/

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...