Weird coincident.. last I week I installed "Flash MX 2004" in linux using wine. Works flawlessly! Gonna make some cool shit for "newgrounds flash forward 2026"
Notice that it's still very much possible to produce SWF files with languages like Haxe http://haxe.org/, and there are frameworks that mimic the Flash drawing API like OpenFL https://www.openfl.org/, there is (or was) a lot of interesting stuff like that happening around.
Flash editor was the magic
Indeed, Flash UI is really its strenght, the way to draw and manipulate curves, I don't think I've seen anything like it after that, although illustrating is not my trade. However, it is possible to do cool procedurally generated stuff with the drawing API, or use plain normal bitmap graphics to do things.
Adobe’s pen tool across all titles is second to none. There is so much value in just that one tool done right.
I had a start programming and doing little weird animations back in the early 2000s. Then I could earn a living doing stuff with Actionscript, little games on the web, or profile picture generators; even stuff on the BlackBerry PlayBook, which had support for AIR runtime. I made games with Flash and Actionscript until ~2015. Newgrounds even holds a jam called Flash Forward, in which you submit Flash games https://www.newgrounds.com/collection/flash-forward
I stopped using Flash long before it became Animate. I'm really sad to see it go, and that Adobe has so little love to this important piece of the web and the Internet.
yeah, definitely gonna participate in NG's flash forward
Some more earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46859732
They could have at least offered some legacy version for file access