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Jack Doyle will you please save Flash?

little_fat_girl test
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This thread was started before GSAP 3 was released. Some information, especially the syntax, may be out of date for GSAP 3. Please see the GSAP 3 migration guide and release notes for more information about how to update the code to GSAP 3's syntax. 

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Because you are one of the people who knew Flash and understood what made it great, I thought I'd ask.

 

I was originally going to title this post "Any chance Greensock could replace CreateJS in AnimateCC?" Then I realized what I was asking was a little bigger.  However, that is the gist of what I'm wondering. Is there a way to use the Greensock library as the engine that drives the animation when publishing from AnimateCC instead of CreateJS?

 

The CreateJS library isn't getting updates (worse than Flash and Air). It's slow on mobile. Interaction is unbearably laggy. It's essentially unusable for any decent experience. 

 

But Greensock has always been the bleeding edge of speed, efficiency and stability. If it were powering all the timeline tweens and interactions when users published to html5, Flash could again be a viable tool for creating animation and games on the web.

 

The Flash tool provided a wonderful GUI with which to create animation and games for coders and noncoders alike. When you published, it just worked. Nearly a decade after its 'death' we still haven't found a suitable replacement. 

 

Greensock is great. But there are those of us who find it prohibitively difficult to animate with code. And maybe I should just be asking for a Greensock GUI that has a timeline and MovieClips like Flash. But Animate is there. And it might just need the power and performance of Greensock to make it live again.

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Hi little_fat_girl,

 

Your struggling is quite close to me.

So I'd like to add my few thoughts looking back on my some recent experience.

 

I was working in Flash and Animate CC for years. I even was Animate CC beta tester.

After seeing/experiencing constant lags, bugs and no progress in solving that I have decided to replace that software at all.

 

I'm very happy that I have found GSAP, this great forum, its people and spent some really short time (week or two) for learning basic GSAP code.

 

NOW:

 

I don't need any html animation GUI software.

I don't depend on Adobe updates, subscription.

I don't have to scroll that timeline all the time, see those lags etc.

I don't have to see all that extremely overloaded code. Now my code is short, clean and I love that order. 

 

I just fill total power and freedom with GSAP and my membership investment was covered within few days.

 

What I'm trying to say is in fact you can avoid using Animate CC at all !!!

 

Just install some coding IDE and take few weeks for learning basic html, css and gsap syntax.

Make very simple animations. All possible questions are already answered here on forum or covered in docs section.

 

Very soon you will be happy to see your improvements in animation and coding overall.

 

Good luck!

 

Cheers

Vitaliy

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  • Solution

I feel your pain. And I appreciate your kind words about GSAP. We lived in Flash every day for years and it still has a warm spot in my heart, but I haven't even opened it for months...probably over a year actually. 

 

Part of me relishes the challenge of building a GreenSock-ified version of CreateJS and I absolutely see the value of having a GUI to drag stuff around on timelines. Certain animations can really benefit from that. But it's a HUGE undertaking to build from scratch. It's not something we have the resources to tackle at this point. 

 

Grant Skinner (the main author of CreateJS) is a very skilled developer and I have lots of respect for him. 

 

I think it'd be smart to have Adobe use GSAP as the runtime animation engine for whatever is build in the IDE, but I'm sure that's not a simple undertaking for them to rip out the current guts and swap in GSAP. Then again, maybe it's not that hard. I don't know, but if it's something you wish Adobe would do, I'd encourage you to tell them. Sometimes I get the impression that it's hard for the big software companies to really understand what the market wants when they've got a lot of momentum internally going toward certain feature sets they decided were important. That's not a criticism of Adobe - I'm just saying it's probably hard for them to know unless they hear from a lot of developers. Make your voice heard. 

 

We did briefly chat about the GSAP+Adobe combo with them years ago and they've always been very kind but it just didn't fit into their roadmap at that time. Maybe they'll reconsider at some point, and we'd certainly be open to chatting again, but their cooperation would be essential for something like this to get off the ground. We can't just hook into their IDE and make it spit out a GSAP-ified version of all the animations. Even if we figured out a way to do that today (without their help), they could release an update next week that breaks everything we did. That's why it's so critical to have a solid commitment from them and plenty of cooperation. 

 

In the mean time, I bet that most of the things you build visually in Flash could be accomplished in GSAP raw in the browser without depending on Flash at all. Yes, it'd take a little time for you to get up to speed on the API and how to build your stuff in HTML/CSS, but most people I've talked to who took the plunge tell me that they now LOVE it and would never want to go back, much like @Vitality said above. 

 

Thanks again for taking the time to share your idea/suggestion. I really wish I could snap my fingers and make this happen.

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Jack. Thank you.

 

It's not (of course) what I had hoped to hear, but thank you so much for taking the time to craft such an informative response. I see the challenges and problems. 

 

Thank you for understanding the value of a WYSIWYG experience and that there are those of us who drown in the coding window. To that end, should the Greensock team ever consider it's own WYSIWYG editor, know that there are those of us who would gladly contribute to that Kickstarter campaign. Even if it just had the sophistication of Flash 4, it would be an incredible tool.

 

I understand the importance of Adobe wanting this before you spend any time on it. I will see if I can make the case. 

 

Thanks for all you do to make our stuff look and run better.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I can't speak for Adobe, but I'm pretty sure Edge Animate is dead (and has been for quite a while). So no updates are planned (from what I can tell). It'd probably be wise to consider shifting to either all code (like code your stuff with GSAP raw) or maybe use Adobe Animate CC for things that require a visual GUI. The only caveat there is that the output you get from Animate CC will be <canvas>-based. 

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