Will Animate CC still generate SWF files in the future?

[stampedrat]

I feel like I'm part of a rare breed of people who actually harnesses the excellent power of the SWF file (for local usage, not on the web). I use them for live broadcasting digital puppets. They announced that support for shockwave is ending April 9th, so my question is how long will Adobe Animate continue to produce SWF files? Will Animate users still be able to use them locally? Or is the "support ending" just meaning that they won't push to make web usage functional? I'm just hoping that animators can still use SWFs for local purposes. Please keep them as an option!

-Tom

twitter.com/duckingCool

[kdmemory]

Hi Tom

Don't you worry. What will stop in 2020 is support for the Flash Player as Browser Plug-In. That is already de-facto made very inconvenient as you might have noticed.

Working with Actionscript 3, publishing as SWF is so intrinsically build into the fabric of Animate CC (formerly known as Flash) that it will be kept as long as Animate exists. You will be able to export a projector with wrapped-in player or work in Air for desktop or Android or iOS.

PS: Shockwave support will end April the 9th? Where did you see that. Can you paste the URL to that 'info'.

Klaus

[stampedrat]

Thanks for clarifying that, Klaus! What a relief!

I read about it here:

Adobe Shockwave will be discontinued on April 9th - The Verge

[kdmemory]

Be aware that I gave you an educated guess as an enthusiastic user. In no way am I an authority at Adobe.who would know about the inner workings. But I think my judgement stands.

The END of Adobe Shockwave is related to Shockwave for Director, an even older beast in the world on Rich Internet Applications. There's often a bit of confusion, is Shockwave also the name in SWF = Shockwave Flash. The Authoring tool Director has been discontinued already sometime in 2017.

Klaus

[stampedrat]

Ok, I appreciate your thoughts. I forgot about Director. Never used it. My backup for AS3 was trying to learn Unity, but that's been overwhelming so far. I'd like to hang onto Animate CC for as long as possible.

[Preran]

To add to what Klaus said, there isn't any plans that I know of to discontinue Flash Player or AIR support in Adobe Animate.

Thanks,

Preran