Welcome Adobe Animate CC, a new era for Flash Professional

[Preran]

To more accurately represent its position as the premier animation tool for the web and beyond, Flash Professional will be renamed Adobe Animate CC, starting with the next release in early 2016.

For more information, see this blog post Welcome Adobe Animate CC, a new era for Flash Professional | Adobe Flash Professional Team Blog by Rich Lee, Senior product marketing manager.

Also see

Flash, HTML5 and Open Web Standards

Update about Edge Tools and Services | Creative Cloud blog by Adobe

Thanks,

Preran

[Mohanaraj]

That's correct!

[tomaugerdotcom]

I'm taking time out of my busy schedule to write on this forum, having just shipped another iOS mobile app that was built entirely in Flash, to express my concern. Like Keith, we are deeply invested in the AS/AIR framework but are seriously considering moving to another platform after fighting with AIR bugs for over 3 years and not seeing any major momentum for fixing issues that have sucked hundreds of productivity hours from our dev team. Things like type rendering issues, lack of programmatic text styling options (anyone ever try to style bulleted lists?), debugger crashes, display issues, performance and screen redraw rate issues, memory leaks and GC issues, not to mention native hardware-specific issues like interfacing with the iOS photo browser (what a joke that is), lack of support for intents and accessing simple things like iOS settings. The list goes on.

So.

This is a very serious question for me. We have invested literally hundreds of hours building an ActionScript framework (called Kestrel - TomAuger/kestrel · GitHub) whose primary purpose was getting around all the AIR bugs and making it viable to develop serious apps using AIR in a way that best leverages the Flash authoring system and the mindshare of all those awesome Flash designers (Animate animators? come on, I agree with @ddhales).

And I'm seriously considering throwing it all away and starting over in Meteor, or NativeScript or React. Because I haven't seen any momentum from Adobe on addressing the AIR instability.

And now this announcement. I've combed the list of "features" and absolutely nothing addresses the huge issues with the AIR runtime. And this makes me think - they're dropping it completely in favour of an HTML5/SVG animation workflow.

I'm literally going to be walking into a tech strategy meeting in a couple of weeks to talk to my dev leads and decide whether we should throw away our current workflow, tools and expertise in favour of an open source platform that is being actively developed. I need to know whether this new focus on "Animate" will mean more dev dollars and more headcount on the runtime / mobile platform development side.

There are currently 1000 some-odd open bugs in the Adobe Bugbase for AIR (Search), many of which have been hanging around since 2011 I get it. Software development is hard. WordPress has 3000+ open bugs as of this writing (Custom Query – WordPress Trac), BUT, it's open source and mostly community-maintained, unlike a Pro product with corporate backing and a freaking subscription model for the love of Pete.

So, are we going to be seeing any movement on improving AIR and a commitment to multi-platform mobile development from Adobe?

[keithleyson]

I agree 100% with Tom's concerns. I too would need to discuss these changes to our directors before the upcoming holidays. I'm sure they will have some nice choice of words when they hear major changes to the tool that we rely and heavily invested in. Not to mention the dropping of Edge Animate which half of our team is also using to develop HTML5 (not canvass) e-learning projects.

[gperry91]

"Major changes"... what major changes!? It's a name change... they're only ADDING features. Otherwise it's the same exact tool! I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

[Colin Holgate]

In the last three years there have been 14 releases of AIR (Adobe AIR Help | Release Notes), surely Adobe took care of some of the things you had to work around back then?

About Edge Animate, I think the current version still works, and won't be disabled by Adobe. Hopefully some of the CSS HTML5 features will make their way into Animate CC.

[W_J_T]

I noticed, Preran, this threads originator posted the following over in the Edge Forum:

Post #195 Can anyone confirm that Edge Animate is now discontinued?

Preran Adobe Employee -  Dec 10, 2015 12:45 PM

All the current features in Flash Pro will be retained in Adobe Animate CC. From what I understand, there will be features to support both HTML and Flash based workflows moving forward.

It would be nice if he came back to this thread and addressed things in more detail.

[WilliamRhoades1]

Flash can do much more than animate. The new title should be FLA short for Flash animate. It would be perfect since currently all flash files are called .fla's. There are a bunch of haters out there saying flash is dying. This is patently false! For example while you-tube is claiming it isn't flash based if you look at the online live video uploader it still uses flash to capture input from the camera. The need to re-brand is based largely on the premise that flash is dying. While it's true that video can now be streamed in html5 that was only a tiny aspect of the overall power of flash. For example if I wanted to make a mobile app I'd make it in flash. Why? Because it was designed to handle very complex user interfaces and graphics. It is super easy to make games in flash. In fact the company is taking the wrong direction. If anything Flash and adobe needs to strongly consider whole heartily adopting the node.js community. Seeing as how AS3 is deeply routed in java-script it is a perfect companion for taking Flash into the new era. As for catering to the animation community that is equally important. I see flash as the corner stone of all application development. It is a one of a kind multi-platform product that is not only easy to learn but it has many features for creating highly sophisticated applications. Many people don't realize that steve jobs was motivated by greed to keep flash off safari. If people could visit a website for their software instead of going to an app...  itunes store would have meant almost nothing. Even today their new project "swift" looks like a knock off of flash. Here are some things the flash mobile developer community desperately needs. 1 better UI for business class functions such as a better scroll bar etc etc. 2 A strong community tie with the node.js team so people can quickly develop back end networking. 3 Easier guides and methods for managing near field communications support. (blue tooth).

Flash is still #1 for mobile application development in my opinion.   the #'s don't lie. here is how long it takes to make tic tac toe in different programs.

flash tutorial 9 min https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXivdNQkWis

xcode... 20 minutes long https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fu0ZQlDZmy8

a similar game in android...... a painfully long 10 part series that spans over 3 hours.

I'd say flash deserves to keep it's speedy sounding name. Because you can develop with it in a FLASH.

https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/27mu3v/why_do_android_dev_tools_still_suck

http://devcodehack.com/xcode-sucks-and-heres-why/

Also dear adobe flash. If you do consider going full node.js Please start leveraging your weight to push the use of adobe branded tools similar to the ones done by the NO-ip  DNS community. Being able to quickly create a Flash program and write node.js server side code combined with the power of seamlessly launching your server live from your home despite non static IP is very powerful. Especially if you consider the fact that since you'd be controlling the redirecting service... So you could essentially launch to the cloud with a simple file upload. "since the url path would be preserved and the DNS path tool could redirect to the cloud" It would take the cost of developing a fully networked application down dramatically.

Here is an example of the kinds of things you can do with flash + node.js + port forwarding + a DNS service. I designed and launched this

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1u4kflf7ue26tpb/chat-with-me.air?dl=0

adobe flash team hook me up if you use  some of my ideas okay? How does  a modest 8% sound?

[ssshammi]

why why? what about 3d in flash. i am looking for unity3d like authoring tool. if people want to make html pages there is already a animate cc. AIR applications for  desktop and andriod and ios  cannot be categorized as animate cc application. this is a disaster. flash developer will lose their unique identity.

[marjantrajkovski]

Adobe realize that everyone for years talk about FLASH BANNERS and not about SWF BANNERS. Because that, awesome HTML5 BANERS from Flash Professional must not be FLASH BANNERS but must be example ANIMATE BANNERS. It is complicate and long to say FLASH HTML5 BANNERS.

I have only one concern, they must implement DOM technology because they kill Edge Animate. Canvas is not always best solution (live text, input text, resizing vector SVG...)

[rosebudd]

Discontinuing development does not equal kill. No one is going to make anyone quit using Edge, there just won't be new anything to look forward to.

I used the HTML text editor (Homesite) that Macromedia bought from the Allaire brothers, then Adobe inherited, up until this year. Now I love Adobe Edge Code Preview AKA Brackets, but use Dreamweaver for multiple folder level find and replace.

Coming from Flash, I hated Edge, and am very pleased with going back to Flash, so to each his own. It is extremely easy to hit the ground running with Flash CC Canvas if you know Flash. Try it.

[marjantrajkovski]

I am using both app and must say that Edge have smoothest and lighter animations because is using DOM. Canvas render is problem for CPU and GPU. Did the Adobe think about our customers which dont use that powerfull computers like designers and developers.

[rosebudd]

The answer is yes, and it appears you have not watched the Cory Hudson MAX presentation. There is a new class called AdHelperJS. As I know you are creating banners, I am surprised you have not watched the video called HTML5 Advertising with Flash Pro CC Canvas.

The other great news for banner creators is Doubleclick/Google is hosting the CreateJS libraries

DoubleClick hosted JavaScript libraries - DoubleClick Creative Solutions Help

White Paper: HTML5 Banner Ads With CreateJS

AdHelper is a helper class that makes it easier to build and deploy ads using CreateJS. It serves a number of functions, and is very easy to set up.

Detects when the ad is not visible (ex. in a background browser tab), and sleeps the ad and mutes all sound. Resumes / unmutes the ad when it is visible. The "hidden" property is set accordingly and the sleep and wake events are dispatched as normal.

This feature is enabled automatically when using AdHelper.

Static methods to replace your ad canvas with alternative content. This can be useful when CreateJS is not supported, or if performance monitoring determines the ad is running too slowly. There are three methods, that give different levels of control.

Force all MovieClips in the ad to operate in time-synced mode (ie. by setting framerate on all MovieClip instances). This allows the ad to play back with a predictable duration even if the real framerate fluctuates.

Monitors playback framerate, and uses a simple heuristic to determine when the ad fails to satisfy configurable performance minimums. Dispatches a slow event and sleeps the ad by default. Works with visibility features to avoid failing while in a background tab due to throttling.

[marjantrajkovski]

Adobe Animate HTML5 banner

[ssshammi]

Flash is not a banner making tool any more and we should not be limiting it animate to just that. we need to make rich immersive web sites and UI in apps, also 3D and games. If you are tying to reinventing what flash can already do to support html5 you are simply not moving forward. We need more tools for complex UI and 3d development, Games, premium HD video even this is where the world is moving. Banner is flash past, I think the new Animate will be able to make rich website at-least that what the showed in the demo video. But i still don't like calling it Animate (Aka a banner making tool or a GIF/Sprite sheet tool). Like in the other post i said call it Apple CC may be it will sell better. because that's what you want it to be, you are scared to show steve that flash can do much more and its not dead.

[marjantrajkovski]

Flash SWF banners are coming back through Animate HTML5 banners.

[tomaugerdotcom]

There might be something in Project Comet that would be diverting some of what you're talking about regarding UI and prototyping, but it doesn't sound like that's going to be a full-fledged development environment the way Flash / Flex Builder has been.

I think we all realize that Flash == Animate != Flash is dead, but we're hearing so much about banner ads that it makes me nervous that the other stuff is going to get less and less attention. And maybe that's as should be - most Google, SE and GitHub content around ActionScript / AIR issues, questions, libraries etc are all 2008 to 2012; there's clearly a lot less of a dev community than there was half a decade ago.

I for one would love to hear some clear direction from Adobe around what their roadmap is as far as the platform, particularly the viability of AIR for mobile.

[keithleyson]

Ditto!

I can't like your post enough.

[nezarov]

Is there any new solution for the TextField "Right to Left Direction" property in as3?

[puttc23859114]

I've been searching for more details about Animate, and what to expect, but am not finding these questions answered out there:

• Will Animate be HTML5-based? No more ActionScript? More like Edge Animate, with JavaScript/HTML5/CSS?

• Will the current workflow of Flash be what Adobe Animate models after, Edge Animate, or will it be a hybrid of both?

[Colin Holgate]

Adobe Animate IS Flash Professional, just with a new name. All the workflow is the same. With Edge Animate no longer being developed  there is a chance/hope, that the new Animate will gain some CSS animation features, but that's certainly not guaranteed.

My bet is that the first version of Adobe Animate will be identical to the current version of Flash Pro, but perhaps including any recent feature changes or bug fixes. BTW, I don't mind if I'm wrong, and it comes with lots of new features!

[puttc23859114]

Thanks for the info...

Do you know if it will be ActionScript, or...?

[Colin Holgate]

It will be what it is already, meaning you would use AS3 for AIR apps or for SWF, and you would use JavaScript for HTML5 Canvas or HTML5 WebGL 2D. There isn't any automatic conversion of AS3 to JavaScript, if you're doing an HTML5 FLA you would use JavaScript directly in the timeline.

[puttc23859114]

I understood that ActionScript would be going the way of Latin...so, good to hear I need to keep up that language skill!

Also, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that support for Edge Animate would be going away...is this true?

[Colin Holgate]

I mentioned Edge Animate in my earlier message. It's not being further developed, but it's still around, and is a valid option. It does things that Flash Pro can't do, but hopefully those features will get added to Adobe Animate.