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!
