Ask HN: About Creating a Flash Replacement | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: About Creating a Flash Replacement

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There have been a couple of popular threads on the demise of Flash.

Its clear Flash had several things going for it, in particular easy to create animation content for the web.

I am up for creating a similar editor. Anyone else interested in joining in?

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https://www.openfl.org, but it would be awesome to have an editor.

Here is a discussion I've found: https://community.openfl.org/t/i-think-openfl-need-a-power-u...

Also an open-source candidate: http://en.fairygui.com

Hi, I cursorily tried out openfl.org Just to open a demo, it had to download a lot of stuff, took a long time and I just gave up.

Former Flash/AS Designer/Front-end Dev here with a couple of thoughts; Timeline animation is the most obvious feature of Flash to most people, and it was also the reason why so many Devs hated Flash. This niche is for Animators, and there are lots of timeline animation tools around, including Animate, which is just Flash rebranded. I used to teach Flash as well, and 'easy to create animation' is a relative term for sure!

For me, the value in Flash was the Stage, Symbols, and the Library, using the single frame movie paradigm. This allowed designers to import graphics and create complex UI layouts, interactive content and animations using Symbols, which could then be controlled using Actionscript.

In that light, I think a good path would be to create a Flash-like visual IDE that integrates with Haxe, which has a ton of target languages and platforms, but which lacks this kind of visual front end.

Can you elaborate on how Haxe would contribute to this? Currently, I am envisioning only browsers across all platforms.

Haxe can output Javascript. The utility in Haxe is really in being able to target multiple platforms. I work in mobile/embedded so that's where i'm coming from.

Reminds of Blender's animation tools. But with python instead of JS

Hype is an editor for HTML5 animations https://tumult.com/hype/

Haven't used it, but I am sure it isn't the only one in this market

For cartoons, there is plenty of other software, including Adobe Animate

This goes multiple ways

- An animation editor like Flash? Ther's still Animate

- A "multimedia" framework for standalone content? I would doubt there is a demand nowadays

- A browser-targeted/cross-platform animation editor? That would be nice.

For the latter, there were some tries already, even from Adobe. The problem is cross-browser compatibility and performance.

I'd really like to see something based on https://greensock.com/gsap/ They solved all the hard problems already, and its itself based on a Flash/ActionScript framework so terms and structures are familiar, eg. keyframe based tweens.

Iirc there are some tools to export After fx animation json to html 5, not sure how good they are though.

Similar to your third point - a browser-targeted/cross-platform animation editor.

Is there any good introduction how the original editor worked? I think I tried to use it once ages ago, but it wasn't really intuitive for me to use it for anything...

The part I remember: You could draw something, then advance to a different point in time, move stuff around there, and then this would form an animation(?).

What I didn't get at all: How would one be able to make a game out of this?

There was scripts. you could add code to any object in the screen.

Does this mean it boiled down to code mostly in the end? For instance, how would one design animations for objects separately from the "master" timeline? Was this possible in the editor somehow? Or just code?

You could create SVG separately, even import it.

Then there was the logic eg. if user clicks this, then start this, or if this action is accomplished then start this...

I always thought that a good editor for SVGs would be a solid replacement for Flash...

An editor alone would not do. We would also have to add logic ie when user click this, do this...

That's just Javascript...

Here's what I see for the MVP:

1) simple SVG editor 2) timeline and tweening 3) simple logic creator (when user clicks this, do this. or this action finished then do this) 4) outputs to some file

It would be a browser oriented and cross platform editor. The first targets could be tutorials, slide presentation creators. Then simple animation.

Anyone interested in joining in, holler.

A question is whether HTML5 can be as fast and lightweight as flash. I think it's a big part of the experience and can be hit or miss in HTML, with some things being faster but others resource hogs (like video). The good thing about flash was its more or less consistent performance, and generally not very cpu intensive

I think one of the complaints about Flash was it was very cpu intensive! It would not even work on the earlier iPhones - one of the reasons it died. The recent threads about Flash go into further detail.

i've always thought it would be great to have something similar that created animation using CSS. CSS animation seems to be pretty neat these days. not sure what the performance of something like that would be though.

CSS animation is limited, but standard and less intrusive than an equivalent JS animation. It's nothing new.

Is HTML5 not the intended replacement for Flash?

I think this thread is mostly about the editor? Ideally the output format would be SVG or HTML5 today probably...

Yes. Output could be an HTML5 element or something similar.

What’s wrong with Adobe Animate?

The first of those two words.

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