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Ask HN: Spiritual Successor of Flash Websites?

8 points by ohohoho ↗ HN
I loved making websites in flash and actionscript before the death of flash. I just want to draw stuff, highlight parts of drawings, right click, add a click handler, jump between frames. What other tools exist today that'd let me hand draw a website? And are there any powerful enough to make a full web app, let's say a twitter clone?

12 comments

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themodelplumber
Doesn't Adobe still make tools that support this style of creation? I thought they did but it's been a while.
ruskyhacker
Air / Harman I think?
JoeyJoJoJr
Harman Air (previously Adobe Air) is still around, but stay far away from it. It’s on life support and only a single developer at Harman maintains it. Despite the awesome efforts of said developer (who has improved things far more than Adobe did in the final years) the toolchain is broken in many aspects.
d13
Flash still lives! It’s now called Adobe Animate, and exports to HTML/JS instead of a proprietary swf. Adobe was just unable to communicate this so no one knows it. Also look at Construct 3 (it’s awesome!), or even Godot (which exports to HTML5) - both are Flash’s spiritual successors.
ohohoho
thank you! did not consider using game engines as i'm only interested in making websites / simple crud apps, not games, but i might just try building a web app in construct or godot and see what happens :). do you have experience with this?
JoeyJoJoJr
Unfortunately Adobe has sucked all the fun and creativity out of Flash/Animate and there is virtually no worthwhile ecosystem surrounding it, not to mentioned the countless bugs. I still rely heavily on Animate CC in my game dev workflows, but think time is far better spent on other tools. IMO Godot looks like it is shaping up to be the closest thing to a modern Flash.
beardyw
It now perfectly possible to do anything Flash did in JavaScript/CSS (am open to correction). Not sure why you would choose anything else.
satyrnein
The question was about finding a similar developer experience, not how to create similar user experiences.
ohohoho
exactly! looking for the flash dev experience applied to web app development.
alberth
Flash, Shockwave, Silverlight, Java Applet, and many more.

Be cautious investing time into development on a user downloadable runtime.

singlemalt
Keyshape on MacOS is definitely not a full replacement. But it is an incredible tool to create animated SVGs (even interactive ones.) An animated SVG is basically a single file SVG that can have embedded JS. It can easily be wrapped.