All I remember from the Flash days, and I was a flash developer bear in mind, was clunky, contentless, CPU hammering folly. None of which I think I miss.
Also lots of indie game devs (e.g. team meat of super meat boy or binding of Isaac) got their start there, a lot of the early "upload your flash game here" might have paved the way for getting so many games on the app store model when it got going.
Less facetiously many web based games would not have been possible with other options available at the time. I can't think of as many significant tools that it was in part responsible for and it massively outstayed its welcome (a few years before Google maps and http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/ I expect flash or java applets would have been needed to achieve the same effect both because of browser performance & compatibility issues at the time and the fact then JS was disabled in many environments too), but thre were some things it was still the least bad option for until a few years ago, video (thing youtube and similar) being the main one.
> clunky, ..., CPU hammering
Definitely, though there were some great programmers out there making efficient things in flash, it had the issue of making it easy to create a sub-optimal mess (some would say the tooling made it overly hasslesome to create something efficient, though I was never a flash programmer so I can't comment there myself).
> contentless
The same can be said of a great many things not involving flash; before, during and after flash's heyday!
> folly
One man's folly is another man's comic (or otherwise artistic) genius. There was a lot of dross, but flash allowed the creation of some great pieces in its time.
Not so many practical tools spring to mind but on the arts and creative side of things most definitely.
Small cultural artifacts move humanity in more subtle ways than the utilitarian behemoths mentioned by you.
Weebls Stuff and Rathergood influenced my thinking a lot by introducing 14yo me to absurd. I'm sure less popular creations made in Flash had some effect too.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Binding_of_Isaac_(video_ga...
Quite an ambitious achievement for a simple animation tool.
One thing I know to be true. The corporate world is run by insecure, ill informed pretenders who fear accountability above all else. People who only make a decision when someone under them has put their neck on the line.
Flash and Flex's success in financial services was not based on merit. It was based on fear of deviating from the norm.
> Google Maps
Here you go.