Animate 2025?

[Willi Lopes]

Will there be no update for Animate this year?

[Willikolho]

I created the post and didn't mark it as correct; I'm trying to unmark it as correct.

[HelenWLee]

Good.

[JoãoCésar]

Hi.

They have removed my moderator status, but it seems I can at least remove an answer wrongly marked as correct.

[Willikolho]

Thanks João! 

[HelenWLee]

Thank you! 

[kglad]

@JoãoCésar 

was that your choice?

[JoãoCésar]

@kglad No. I only found out when I tried to mark a post as a spam and the option wasn't there anymore, for example.

Haven't received any notice from the Adobe Community Program as far as I can tell.

[kglad]

there have been other inadvertent mod problems.  post in the backroom and flag sil if you want reinstatement.

[JoãoCésar]

Thanks. Will do.

[kglad]

thumbs up!

[Ylazy]

Now it's "Animate 2026?"

[HelenWLee]

Yeah. Happy New Year. #goingbacktoCS

[Ylazy]

I even thought about creating tons of fake accounts to spam all the forums. No! I don't want to do that! Don't force me! I'm a good person! Is this the birth of a villain? It seems like another personality is emerging within me. Nooooo...

[kglad]

no forun post or forum deluge is going to have an impact.  money, however, does have an impact.

[rayek.elfin]

For those interested: I just found out about Friction, which seems on the verge of becoming an intriguing alternative to Animate and even (somewhat) to After Effects for web animations. I've been testing it, and Friction already feels reasonably mature for web animations.

Multiple scenes and timelines are supported, vector and bitmap animation, a proper graph editor, export to animated SVG, expressions, and more. It is about to hit release 1 status for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

https://friction.graphics/

Remarkably enough this is an open source project. One to watch, in my opinion.

[Lucaksic]

Good to know, this sounds interesting especially if it’s open source.

I just wish there were a way to handle frames like Adobe Animate (frame by frame), as I really hate how tweens work in After Effects and other programs. Make things complicated and slower for no reason.

I'll definitely keep my eyes on it. Hopefully it develops into something great.

[Pongo8]

Honestly, that software doesn't look very exciting to me (it doesn't even remind me of Flash / Animate), but at least someone is trying. And that's a good sign.

Genuine question: If someone recreates Flash / Animate from scratch and makes it open source (and free and available to everyone), do they run the risk of getting sued by Adobe?

If the answer is yes, is there anything that can be done to the open source project (development-wise) OR legally, to ensure total protection from Adobe's greedy claws in the court?

Like if Adobe's argument is: "they steal our software!", could the developer of this new open source project rename every single element of the original software to something else? Like "Symbols" are renamed to "Signs", "Graphics" to "Images", "Keyframes" to "Markers" (bad examples, I know but it should illustrate my point).

Alternatively, could the open source "Flash clone" be modified visually to look a bit less like Flash / Animate, in order not to get caught into legal problems?

At this point, there should be a law, that takes away Adobe's rights to Animate, because they neglected it for so long. It sounds like a breach of contract to me. People pay monthly and for what? No new version or update is coming. Basically money out of the window. 

Adobe is like a drunken, irresponsible parent who needs to lose custody of their kid (Flash / Adobe), so someone else can adopt it and take good care of it. 

[kglad]

adobe's not done anything like this and they're being condemed.

[default4mciqkld69iv]

Translation:

Creating exactly the same program as Animate, and in the same programming language, would have consequences. Adobe would have the legal right to take action against you through the courts, and so on. Simply renaming functions wouldn’t work. You would need to change both the design and the engine, and write your own engine instead of just copying it from the original program and passing it off as your own.

Of course, there are many things that can remain the same as in Animate — those are the features and tools that are common to all vector editors.

In short: if you write your own engine, everything will be fine; but if you copy it and present it as your own, there will be consequences. Imagine you created some software and were selling it, and then someone copied it, claimed it as their own, and even distributed it for free — would you stay silent?

But writing a full program with all the features similar to Animate would be difficult and time-consuming. And that raises the question: who would spend so much time on a program that wouldn’t pay off? Because with open source, as I understand it, the software would have to be free.

[HelenWLee]

The normal thing about most Open source projects is that it's made by a community, not just one guy. That makes this kind of things possible. Animate was actually re-developed fr ground up by mainly one guy with a small team. Definately possible.

[rayek.elfin]

An excellent open source alternative for Animate's animation features already exists: OpenToonz or Tahoma2D (which is an offshoot of OT). These already offer a much deeper and broader animation feature set than the base version of Animate. All for free.

[HelenWLee]

Open Toonz/Tahoma is great but it´s not at all like Flash/Animate.

[JoãoCésar]

The current best alternative to Animate is Rive, especially now that it has support for scripting.

Even its creatores are promoting it comparing to Flash.