This is just sad but inevitable. To this date Macromedia Flash MX was one of the most beginner friendly , yet super powerful tools I've ever used. Probably what dragged me even more into computers back when i was a kid.

Things from flash era I really liked:

* How their comprehensive tutorial was just a .FLA file , that automatically opened on the first run, that you can even edit. I feel like blender, kicad - both the tools i want to learn right now, could use something like that.

* Progress bars - you know that once the progress bar fills up, the website/game etc.. is fully loaded onto your machine and you can simply disconnect the Dial up modem and continue checking things out . I wonder if this kind of behaviour might benefit today's SPAs.. especially when you can just download a wasm blob and you know it'll be cached.. at least for websites which don't have to be searchable by a search engine and are more than just documents.

* I don't know where we went wrong but these days we download megabytes of JavaScript and so many raster images and still offer way less fluid experience than what flash sites used to be like. I know some of it also was because of responsive design requirements across so many form factors, but there's definitely something that we are missing and i don't know what it is. Svgs are routinely "exported to high resolution pngs" for websites. Something just is off.

Either way, RIP Flash