Adobe Flash Player, the web browser plugin, will no longer be updated in 2020.
The Flash IDE, now called Animate, continues to be developed by Adobe. They have not announced an end of life for this tool. It will still be updated after 2020. In fact, it can now export a variety of new formats other than SWF files for Flash Player, and they've been expanding the animation features quite a bit in recent years.
It's unfortunate that many people are confused about what exactly Adobe has discontinued. So many people in this thread are lamenting that this user friendly animation tool no longer exists as a starting point for new users, when in fact, it does and will still be in active development beyond 2020.
It’s worth noting that it’s no longer a user-friendly tool for making interactive experiences, though. The current version of Actionscript is working hard to be a Real Programming Language, with a lot more code to write to make anything happen. It feels like Java to AS2’s Basic, and you just can’t write stuff in AS2 any more.
(AS1 is gone too, it was something you had to write by selecting verbs in a massive dropdown, and good riddance to that.)
> So many people in this thread are lamenting that this user friendly animation tool no longer exists as a starting point for new users, when in fact, it does and will still be in active development beyond 2020.
Animate really isn't as simple to use as Flash is, and bluntly in the modern Era the CC suite is too expensive to get those young users.
I wonder if Affinity will have a go at this in the long run.
The Flash IDE, now called Animate, continues to be developed by Adobe. They have not announced an end of life for this tool. It will still be updated after 2020. In fact, it can now export a variety of new formats other than SWF files for Flash Player, and they've been expanding the animation features quite a bit in recent years.
It's unfortunate that many people are confused about what exactly Adobe has discontinued. So many people in this thread are lamenting that this user friendly animation tool no longer exists as a starting point for new users, when in fact, it does and will still be in active development beyond 2020.