Edit in january 2020 : Flash player is now definitely dead and the part I discuss here is about Adobe Air, which is no longer maintained by Adobe anymore. So I don’t think prototyping in Flash, sorry Animate, has a future anymore… Read this article to remind you the benefits of this wonderful software, which STILL is an animation software.
The trend in UX design today is to search for the best prototyping tool.
That’s ok. I love discovering new tools. I could have shared a number of new prototyping apps (there’s a new marvelous one every six months) and I have tried another bunch of these trending apps reading some blog posts.
The problem is that I always find there is one missing. Not a small app lost in the meanders of the Internet. No. A huge app. An app that some people tried to murder some years ago. Yes, you know it. Adobe Flash.
Why would I want to bring this app back to life? The point is Adobe Flash is not dead. What is dead is the Flash Player (the browser plugin that allows you to read Flash exported files on some devices). Yes, that’s all. Flash Player cannot live anymore on the web. It has become nonsensical because of all these wonderful open-source languages and technologies like Javascript, Webgl, HTML, CSS which are improved everyday by very talented people.
But Flash is a lot more than the Flash Player. Let me remind you of what it really is.
An animation software
At the very beginning, Flash was supposed to be a very light player doing vector animations. There was no place for fluid animation at the time, apart from GIFs which had to be very light and color-limited. So this software was a small window for huge creativeness.
And today, Flash has kept all the tools that made its success for animation: the pencil tool, the brush tool (which has no equivalent in other vector software), the timeline of course, the onion-skin feature (a must-have for animators), and a lot of other really great tools. You can easily extend these tools with other ones like the awesome Trick or Script plugins or VCam (we’re just waiting for Adobe to integrate these tools…). And there are still a lot of great animations made with this software (as seen aside).
The road is long to a professional animation tool, but there is a really good basis.
A development software
After some time, the Flash team integrated a script language called ActionScript. As soon as it became possible to save numbers into variables, interactivity with vector animations became the trend. It opened a new era of creativity and we were able to see absolutely stunning websites. A lot of them still cannot be done in Javascript. To understand this, have a look at the FWA website, which rewards the best websites ever since 2000.
What made the success of this language is its simplicity. Within one day, you could understand how it works, and begin to create a full website. Even if you were a designer, like me, with absolutely no knowledge in coding.
And then ActionScript 3 came up. This was not really a script language, but rather a complete development environment, with very powerful features. You had to forget all you had learned in ActionScript 2, and try to think as a developer and not as a creative. That meant that you could not mess up your ActionScript files anymore…
Since Adobe acquired Macromedia Flash, it became more and more development-oriented. And naturally, it was more suited for gaming studios (Angry Birds was initially developed on Flash and a lot more are still done with it). While ActionScript 3 was improved, the user interface was filled with useless features and buggy tools (see this decorative drawing tool). And designers began to abandon Flash.
Some didn’t, like Jakub Dvorský who first brillantly developed this excellent game called Samorost on Flash. He then created his studio, Amanita Design, which still uses Flash as their tool of choice to create wonderful games like Machinarium, which I strongly recommend.
The fact is that thanks to the development team, you can export your Flash Game as an application for smartphones, as a software for desktops, as a game on internet for Flash Player (yes, actually, it is still alive), and much more.
You can even export Flash animations into Javascript animations (via Create.js), and into Webgl.
So now, you see all the potential of Adobe Flash: animation and development.
Flash as a prototyping tool
There is a ton of really good and fast prototyping tools on the web, but Flash can do much more.
You have libraries and components in Flash, so you can prototype pretty quickly, just like you do in Balsamiq Mockups, a popular wireframing tool, by dragging and dropping your assets directly on the stage. You can then edit them in place.
As it is a vector tool, Flash can also import a lot of vector file formats (Illustrator ai, svg, eps) with ease, and you can modify them directly inside Flash. You can even import bitmap files (some photos of your sketches), just like inVision, Marvel app, Flinto or else.
You can then add interactivity and transitions with ActionScript 3, just like the combo Sketch — Framer, but without leaving the software.
But to prototype rich interactions, there is absolutely no tool like Flash. For example, I was asked by a client to make a functional prototype for a puzzle game. Much to my surprise, it took me two days to make it work perfectly on smartphones and tablets. I simply rediscovered the pleasure of working with Flash.
And I’m not a game developer, even not a developer at all.
To give you an idea, the very talented development team had to do it in Javascript, and it took them more than ten days to finish it. Which software allows you to prototype so quickly?
Admittedly, what really lacks today for prototyping a simple smartphone application in Flash (as you do in other fast prototyping tools) is a framework that will leverage the power of ActionScript 3 to code as simply as we did in ActionScript 1. You know, a code like this:
page.button.goToPage = “nextPage”;
page.button.transition = "slideRightToLeft";
page.swipeFromRight = "nextPage";You could even develop a plugin inside Flash to avoid writing these lines.
I’m considering it but if you’re reading me, maybe you’ll want to develop this framework yourself?
So what?
I invite all creatives to test Flash if they haven’t already, because Flash is above all a tool crafted for them.
I invite UX designers that make rich interaction prototypes to (re)consider Flash as a very valuable tool.
Adobe has already begun to recode their software from scratch and remove useless features, which makes me think that I’m not wrong about its potential (you can have a look at its future here). My dream would be to have a really great animation software, very well integrated with After Effects, and at the same time with amazing interactive features for a lot of devices (TV, game consoles, and so on…). This last part is really not easy, but the development team has already achieved really impressive things!
Long live Flash!
