Macromedia Flash had probably the best UX of all the programs ever created. It all goes downhill from there.

I feel that way about a lot of things. Maybe it's just nostalgia...but heck we had Flash, Frontpage, VB,...we were spoiled.

I sometimes wonder why such concepts went away, and everything became far more complicated.

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muzani 2 days ago | parent [-]

Some tools were certainly better, like Flash. Mobile made a lot of things complicated. Half the game dev tools still don't run properly for mobile. HTML5 was supposed to make things easier, and for a while it did, but it got rapidly more complicated afterwards.

Some things are much better today, like Procreate.

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watwut 2 days ago | parent [-]

I dont think HTML5 was supposed to make things easier. It is just that major players wanted to get rid of flash for own reason (some of them valid) and HTML5 was something they were able to point at. It was never easier or even half replacement, it was significantly more complicated and crappier experience for an average normal creator.

It never even got some convincing demo. All those I have seen at the time were the "spend a lot more time to produce something much less impressive" kind of anti demos.

	▲	phendrenad2 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		There still aren't any convincing demos.

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xeonmc 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Is there any reason why they couldn’t be emulated with WASM+canvas?

	▲	Pxtl 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's the flash animation/design tools that are missing from modern young people, not the ability to render it into the browser.
	▲	Cthulhu_ 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No, and a lot of Flash projects have already been converted; notably, Google was one of the first to release a flash-to-html5 converter, because a lot of ads were Flash at the time. But Adobe's missed opportunity was keeping Flash alive, "just" adding a html5 / canvas / JS version instead of the browser plug-ins that were killed when smartphones/tablets refused to support them.