Building a new Flash

nickpsecurity

I remember trying out Macromedia Flash 6.0. My GUI apps were ugly at the time. Learning to build something like I saw in the movies could take years. Then, Flash let me throw together beautiful, animated interfaces like it was nothing. One could do quite a bit after one tutorial. (Note: Quick shoutout to Dreamweaver 6.0 which was a power, WYSIWYG editor. Today, things like Pinegrow might fill the niche.) It's death as a hugely-popular tool was largely due to Apple and Adobe. SaaS model isn't helping it far as wide adoption goes. It also got popular through piracy which hints the replacement should be profitable and widely deployed like open source. I think this might be a good opportunity for a license like PolyForm Non-Commercial. Free users either can't commercialize their content or, like CompCert Compiler, must make the outputs GPL'd (or AGPL'd). The Flash replacement would have a fair, one-time price for unrestricted use with source or you share like they shared with you. What do you all think?

HanClinto

> .fla / XFL import — This is the one I’m most proud of. You can open your old Flash files. As far as I know, this is the only open-source tool that functions as a full authoring environment and can actually import .fla files. Not just play them back — edit them. The backwards compatibility here is pretty clutch. I agree -- if he can build something that is compatible with old files AND pushes things forward for new, then this could do some really awesome stuff.

AndrewDucker

This doesn't make it clear how people will run the end products. Is it targeting the web? If not then it's not going to be useful for the same things as Flash was.

cableshaft

I made Flash Games back in the day. Here's my old profile on Newgrounds: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/ One thing Flash had that nothing else has really seemed to replicate as well since, is an environment that both coders and artists could use. I'd collaborate with an artist, they'd make their animations within an FLA, send it to me, and then I'd copy+paste into the project file, and it'd just work. I could even tweak their animations if need be to remove a frame here or there to tighten the animations and make it feel more fluid, etc. That being said, I'm not sure I could go back to it now. I've been working with Love2D lately, and I prefer that (especially for the version control). FLA version control was always me going 'GameName-1.fla', 'GameName-2.fla', or when I got a little smarter 'GameName-Date.fla'. Eventually they let you split out the actionscript files into its own files, and that was better for version control, but you still had the binary mess of the FLA file. But all these sprite-based game editors just can't handle the crazy intricate animations that vector-based Flash games could handle. Porting one of my old games (Clock Legends) that had hundreds of frames of hand drawn animation for a boss that filled the screen would be ridiculously huge nowadays, but the FLA for that was like 23MB, I believe (I'll need to hunt it down, I have it somewhere), and several MB of that were for the songs in the game. Excited for this project though. It deserves to come back in some form.

alhazrod

I wish Adobe had open sourced Flash - it really was a pretty amazing tool. They could have owned the proprietary developer tool market to support themselves...

LoganDark

Article title could use capitalizing Flash -- I thought it was about NAND at first.

agumonkey

I wonder how much this would impact the react world

noelfranthomas

Don't know much about this space, just curious why build this when we have Rive, Spline, etc?

alcover

May the Gods be with him. The nostalgia is very strong. Opening Flash and start a new project was an immense source of joy to me in the 00's.

graypegg

Exciting! But I can't seem to find any where I can take a peek. It looks like a lot of UI is at least there, and the post makes some big promises about what's already done. The vector icons in the side bar have the distinct cruft of LLM-generated SVGs, so just ideally hoping it isn't a quickly-made UI shell. The big claims about .fla import make me a bit skeptical. Though even so, we're not owed anything and I think it's a cool idea to share!

random3

I built a flash crawler to index all Flash while at Adobe. It started with Alexa top 1M I think then crawled. This was 2008-2010 I think so we had to do a lot of custom stuff, but we basically crawled then ran a headless Firefox with a custom headless Flash player that dumped a ton of data so also analyzed every flash at runtime and indexed all of that. We built a dedicated cluster in a colocation center in Bucharest to handle all of this. Had issues with max floor weights and what not. Then had to upgrade the RAM on on the cluster. No remote hands. Every operation was a trip to a really cold place. Used a lot of early stage stuff like Nutch, Hadoop, HBase etc. Everything was then processed and dumped to an SQL database with a nice UI on top. It took a few weeks to set it up, then we passed it to a team of interns that built the SQL database and UI on top. They learned a ton of stuff. Some are now in the Bay Area. The tool uncovered a ton of security issues. It was fun building it. I wonder if Adobe kept the data. It could be useful and/or good donation for the Computer History Museum.

999900000999

Unless this is open source I don't see the point. We can't trust closed source software for content creation tools. What happens when he gets bored? However, I LOVE C# and would totally be down to contribute if it's open source.

cynicalsecurity

I feel young again.

mock-possum

I just noticed in a dev stream for Cult Of The Lamb that they were using .fla files, what a throwback. I remember those days well!

immy

Hype (YC W11) is for animators to produce HTML5 https://tumult.com/hype/

whywhywhywhy

Think in this day and age starting your project off saying it's open source but making sure to open the patreon first and take money before the repo is a bad start when the reason for the project existing is a closed source paid product is being discontinued. Especially if the dev is working on a sound editor, something Flash doesn't actually need before even having an outputted example up and running or even a video of it working.

Retr0id

It's impressive what people are able to vibecode these days!

ellg

Whats the key difference between this and Rive? Especially now that Rive has full scripting support? Just curious more than anything, this does seem neat, especially the fla / xfl support (although for new things this doesnt seem like a huge killer feature)

markstos

But will there be a browser plugin?

spondyl

This post raises a few flags in my mind that it was at least partly generated by an LLM? That isn't to suggest that this editor doesn't/won't exist, that the editor uses LLM-generated code (which is not a sleight) or that the claims are not truthful. The main things that jump out are the inconsistency in writing style (sometimes doing all lowercase and no punctuation) but then the brief rundown is all perfect spelling and grammar with em-dashes. The "Not just" parts stick out like "Not just play them back — edit them" as well as "This isn’t a proof of concept or a weekend project. It’s a real authoring environment." Anyway, best of luck to the author with their project!