Flash
A short soliloquy

Flash made it so that someone like me, someone who was never going to be a real hardcore coder, could make some pretty amazing things. As of December 31st 2020, it's been finally purged from the internet. An agonizingly drawn-out demise which has been on the cards since 2015. I wanted to take a sincere moment to reflect on what it means to me.

I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for Flash. A rich online community, a wealth of shared code and advice, a human-readable language all combined to make the most user-friendly and fun way of putting together interactive content as rich as the creator’s imagination.
Coming from a video background, I stumbled into Flash via its ease of use for creating animations (I also loved to draw in Flash - the way it would auto-smooth the lines for you made everything just look better!). Soon I had started adding keyframes to my animation timelines which would make the the characters blink and it was a slippery slope from there as the infinite possibilities of actionscript 2.0 stretched out ahead of me! I was hired in 2006 by creative powerhouse Big Red Button to make them a website in Flash. Combining stop motion animated, needle-felted creatures with glowing vector fireflies, I learnt on my feet and was then ready to join the big bad world of the Ad Agency, wielding my new-found Flash over-confidence!

From London to New York, I joined the ranks of the Actionscripers in advertising. When I landed at Rokkan in Manhattan in 2008, our scrappy team felt like the in-house rockstars - there was nothing we couldn’t figure out how to make COOL. Yes, there were plenty of banner ads. But the full-video, lushly animated experiential websites that were all the range on the web at that time were things of beauty. The FWA rewarded them with prestigious awards - each site more visually stunning and groundbreaking than the last. We made websites for the likes of Nintendo, Bethesda Games, Virgin. For a good few years things were golden.
But with the advent on smart phones everything changed. I don’t need to wax poetic about why, but the truth was, the way people used the internet was changing drastically. Flash developers were left with a big decision to make - what would they do next?
Personally HTML5 at that time was so far from touching the things I loved doing with Flash that it was never even an option. I made a hard left, brushed off my video editing software and took a long, sad look in the rear view mirror as the immersive web playground we had labored over for so many years faded from view.
I pushed it though. Even after my wacky combo of video and interactive experience had landed me my dream job at Nickelodeon in 2016, I was still churning out the annual #teamassin Xmas “card” in Flash (even if I had to start providing a video as back up when friends told me they’d deleted Flash from their computers, fearful of “security risks” SMH). And people are always surprised to hear that to this day, I develop apps for iOS and Android using (formerly Adobe, now Harman) AIR - the platform for application development which is.. basically.. Flash.
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