I actually had a side job programming Flash web sites as a student.
Flash didn't deserve its bad reputation, at least at the time. It was a clever way of creating a full-screen animated/multimedia user experience at a time when typical download bandwidth was a fraction of what it is today. Nowadays, of course, CSS and JavaScript handle most things like animated page elements. Which is usually an even more efficient way of doing it.
Flash's real downfall was its proprietary scripting language ActionScript, which introduced new wide-open exploitable vulnerabilities with every update. That's why Flash was usually disabled by default in most modern browsers before development was discontinued. And of course it wasn't mobile friendly. Theoretically, any Flash file could be made to give you a responsive UI design, but it tends to be a power and resources drain on mobile phone CPUs. Although probably not as much anymore as with the first iPhone, on which Apple famously excluded all Flash support.
Javascript and the canvas element can do everything that Flash can do and more, without the appalling security problems. It's quite straightforward to translate other programming languages into Javascript using LLVM and WASM, which allows for some fairly wild applications.
I mean more narrowly stuff like pic related and those old NewGrounds animations and what have you. And all the wierd porn games I used to play when I was a teenlad
Flash was pretty unique in that flash editing applications were a pretty capable standalone art/animation suite, so I wondered what the nowadays equivalent was.
Adobe Animate is the direct replacement for Adobe Flash. It has broadly the same feature set and a similar interface, but it exports in modern standards-compliant formats.
I don't think the death of Flash killed off daft web animations, just the fact that video is much easier. Back in the heyday of Flash, online video was prohibitively expensive and difficult.
HTML5 if it's browser-based wank fodder, or use Adobe AIR if you want to publish it as a mobile app for wanking on the go.
Alternatively, you could use Unity if you want your wanking experience to be in 3D; you'd have the option of a web or mobile app, but also console or VR-based wanking. Unity has the advantage of being completely free for hobbyist and startup weeb perverts. Via the Unity Asset Store, you can buy pre-rigged waifus with physics-based jiggly bits.
>>15962 AIUI it's not a replacement, they just renamed it. (Presumably because of the toxicity that had become associated with the Flash name.) Under the hood, it's still the same product, and works in the same way. ActionScript was basically "JavaScript but what if it worked?" so it's not like it was a big jump to make things work in the browser without the player.
> ActionScript was basically "JavaScript but what if it worked?"
ActionScript was basically ECMAscript like JavaScript, but it had a few specialised functions which at the time would have been a bit of a hassle to implement in vanilla JavaScript 1.x. Especially if you got into the intricacies of controlling animations, or sounds or videos, with buttons.
More recent JavaScript implementations have caught up with what ActionScript used to be able to do, which makes Flash even more obsolete.
It's a bit of a shame that 80 percent of all web sites used Flash almost exclusively for some form of gratuitous web site intro. Which you could implement with less than a handful of ActionScript snippets underneath. As a tool to create animations, Flash was actually the best software available to the professional or semiprofessional web or digital media designer if you didn't want to spend some pretty serious money (although a full Flash licence could cost you up to 300-400 quid). But a lot of times, those Flash intros were an entirely pointless display of somebody's abilities, real or self-proclaimed.
And it was easy to turn people away from a web site with an overblown intro before they even entered it. Especially if somebody didn't know what they were doing, and packed an intro with unvectorised bitmaps or uncompressed sound files that took ages to load (remember this was circa 2000-2004). Or if you were so arrogant in your assumption that people needed to see your work that you didn't even give them a "skip intro" button.
