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> I remember being amazed by the sophistication of the animations some Flash developers could put together using it and I always wondered if the tooling made it easier, or if somebody painstakingly drew cells one by one and then spliced them together with an otherwise relatively dumb video creator.

Flash/Flash Pro/Adobe Animate (it has been renamed now) is sophisticated animation software that just happened to have the flash plugin as one output format. A large number of cartoons for broadcast tv have been made in it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...) and it still exists despite the demise of the flash plugin. It's definitely not just the same as splicing individual frames together.

Just as a data point, I have a car designer friend who absolutely loved drawing in Flash. He said he found the drawing tools really intuitive. At the studio we worked for, he used a StudioMax plugin to export model imagery and animations to SWF and would polish things from there.

Also IMO the AA used in Adobe software was pretty impressive, at least in the early 00s.

it was all Macromedia at one time (before Adobe felt the competition, bought the whole company and rebranded the suite that included Flash). Macromedia Director had an even more powerful set of tools, until Macromedia Flash evolved the ActionScript language and with web dissemination really took over.

Flash (Animate) is still my favourite mockup and design tool. It used to be so much more powerful in that you could export to a lot of different formats. And when your output is just some standard format, it didn't matter what the creation tool was. I could manoeuvre faster in that application than any other tool. And the bonus was that for anything you designed, it was almost trivial to animate it. I now find myself doing svg animation using it + plugins.

Adobe has constantly killed features in it but I still love it.

Adobe AIR was a desktop runtime, analogous to the Flash Player for the browser.

It supported all of the capabilities of Flash in the browser, including Animation, as well as additional desktop specific functionality (such as file system access).

There were two primary authoring tools from Adobe. Adobe Flash (not Animate), which was the traditional designer / animation tool (but also enabled programing), and Adobe Flash Builder, an Eclipse Based IDE targeted at ActionScript development (and a heavy focus on Adobe Flex, a markup based Application development framework built on top of ActionScript / Flash.

Flash was powerful, in part because the Flash Pro authoring tool opened up interactive content development to designers who had little to no programing experience, and then scaled up to allow more advanced functionality via programing.

Note, I work at Adobe, and was responsible for Flash community at Macromedia and then Adobe.

I've always been curious if the Flash animation studio really had anything to offer in terms of usability over, say, modern HTML5 in WebStorm or Visual Studio.

Absolutely, without question. Timeline-based visual animation tools and shape tweening were amazing, even back in 1999-2001. Friends and I used Flash to render animations to video, too.

I've yet to see anything else like it.

Animo hit the market a decade earlier, and was used by many of the big studios. There were some other automatic tweening packages pre 99 whose names I no longer remember. I learned this during a brief internship with a non profit that made educational videos.

Edit: yeah, googled around and remembered another one. RETAS came out in Japan in 1993, and is largely responsible for the uptick in quality of anime around that time.

I don't think I touched most of it, but as a dumbass kid who didn't know how to code yet, I remember taking advantage of:

- layers

- keyframes: you could mark frames as keyframes (per layer, I think?) and then "tween" the contents which would handle animating the movement (and maybe other transforms?) from one key frame to another

- action script for interactivity

I've always been curious if the Flash animation studio really had anything to offer in terms of usability over, say, modern HTML5 in WebStorm or Visual Studio.

It had a huge amount to offer. Very sophisticated vector graphics animations tools with key frames, motion and shape tweening, easing, onion skinning, blending, masking, etc.

You really don't see these amazing sorts of vector graphics animated websites much these days. I think that is due in no small part to the lack of tooling for HTML5 workflows.

If you look on YouTube for something like "Flash CS4", you can find numerous videos showing what the Flash authoring tool was like. I never found it all that much of a pleasure to use, but for people who were good at animation, it was a fairly powerful tool. (I did Flash for a few years and spent most of my time writing ActionScript 3 in FDT, which was built on top of Eclipse; I left the animation stuff to people more capable in that department!)

Yes, animations in Flash were much different than WebStorm or Visual Studio. It was very powerful, and had a javascript-like language to power it as well.