I'd argue that's a very good thing. Obviously lots of people disliked the Flash player for various reasons, but the Flash authoring tool was terrific. Specifically, the features/metaphors it comprised are IMHO precisely the recipe for a powerful design tool:
* Composable hierarchy of objects that can contain other objects
* Each object has states (keyframes) and state transitions
* Each object is an instance of a class, and editing the class affects all instances
* Code can be attached to each object / state / state transition
That the results aren't as good isn't surprising. Flash was specifically built (and optimized) for interactive graphic content like games. HTML was originally made to display text documents and it's been a long series of revisions and hacks to get where it is now.
It wasn't just games. Every damn website had a flash animation that autoplayed and got right in your face.
Flash was also used to bypass privacy controls, create un-deletable tracking cookies, and generally do bad things.
Remember when we needed to update Flash every couple of weeks because it was so full of security holes? And they were serious holes, used by bad people to do bad things to a lot of innocent victims. And, of course, while we were downloading and updating the Flash player, the web was basically useless because every damn site refused to do anything until it could do it with Flash.
No, much as I loved those games, I'm soooo glad we didn't go down that road
Flash, while full of issues, was sort of a prototype of functionality that people wanted built into browsers. It took a while for standards to catch up, because standards move slow.
At the same time, people were motivated to make it happen because of all of those terrible things about Flash.
We can all thank Steve Jobs for delivering the death blow to Flash to really force the issue.
This is kind of funny to see for me after spending a lot of time years ago trying to make some performance intensive games and stumbling on the horrible performance (and API limitations) that Flash - at the time i wished i was able to make applets instead :-P.
A product that I've been keeping an eye on is Subform [1]. Apart from Flash-esque design tools, it includes more or less "novel" ways of defining the layout of the app. I think the layout tools set this product apart form similar offers. One of the main developers has a talk about the philosophy behind the UI of this app [2].
The same team is working on an app to use state machines to define UI interactions, which is also super interesting [3].
2: https://www.deconstructconf.com/2017/kevin-lynagh-choosing-f...
Dude, hate to be the bearer of bad news, but subform shut down, during beta.
I also was keeping track of it and hoping it would launch.
sketch.systems is created by the same people though, and sketch.systems is pretty much their pivot. not quite the same thing but it seems to be receiving a better response in the market.
I just saw that they haven't updated the blog since March or so, but I wasn't sure since their forum is invite only. Did they announce this somewhere? Perhaps they are taking a break from subform to work on sketch.systems.
They announced it on their invite only forum.
> Perhaps they are taking a break from subform to work on sketch.systems.
That’s exactly what they’re doing, except for it being a break.
Qt Quick was introduced in Qt 4.7.
Flash survived longer than most just by developing into a Web-centric product, but for the most part, these products are old and there's room for a new generation of them. The thing that I think has held them back is that it requires a more holistic approach than is usually taken by open-source projects. It's easier to make a programming language that is dumped on top of the C/Unix environment and just accumulates power-user features over time.
I think the key lesson, really, is that you need intuitive metaphors to make such things work. The idea of cards and stacks are highly intuitive in this case.
It's worth booting up Sheepshaver and giving the final version of Hypercard another look. The default home stack -- complete with interactive examples and documentation that you can straight up copy and paste -- is still a marvel of design in my view.
The only contender to Qt in these companies is usually WPF.
Microsoft OneDrive is made with Qt, the Blizzard launcher, the AMD drivers panel, authoring software like Guitar Pro, Maya, CryEngine, Allegorithmic software (one of the slickiest UIs in that field I think : https://www.allegorithmic.com/)... Blackberry also used Qt for their OS's shell and apps, as well as HP/LG WebOS.