I have a question for a niche group of people.

FFS. Four days after asking for suggestions to replace Animate and Adobe announce they're discontinuing the product on 1 March.

So that's put the pressure on finding an alternative.

Also *I* was going to flounce off from you Adobe, not the other way around.

(to be fair, I will still flounce off, but it won't be *quite* as satisfying)

https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/02/adobe-animate-is-shutting-down-as-company-focuses-on-ai/

#animation #Flash

@eclectech Another reason to hate their subscription model.

@eclectech

It is VERY annoying and you are well within your right to be ticked off about it.

Shutting something like this down on a month's notice is garbage.

@eclectech Ouch, that's the thing, you never know what you might want to go back to

@eclectech Ugh

@eclectech

I think it's a fairly big thing!

@eclectech Yeah. When they initially started this, they promised folk would also have access to software.

@eclectech It's not a small thing at all. When Corel shut down their browser based vector tool last year that I used to use on Chromebook, it took nearly 2 full days to download many years worth of stuff. They didn't even provide a bulk export tool. F****rs.
The only positive outcome of that debacle is that I have since completely ditched corpo cloud as a storage solution. Never again.

@eclectech It's an unnecessary pain nonetheless. Is there no file conversion option for any of the Animate export formats at all?

@eclectech Good luck!

@eclectech oh oof I know so many animation studios this is going to hurt a lot

For alternatives, toon boom harmony is good and the main industry standard, but a pain to debug at times, my ex wife is an animator professionally, so that's the perspective I know, and I helped fix her computer a lot. There's also Moho pro, but I haven't seen that used, it looks similar to harmony though

I started trying out Apple's animation software, "Motion", it is more like Adobe After Effects than animate, though, so it really depends on what you're looking for

@eclectech
Fingers crossed that #Adobe throws #Animate into the #open_source community.

Or that another club takes it over like they did with AIR sdk.

We can still use older versions to bake nice compact swfs, animate didn't evolve much since CS6.

@eclectech it's totally okay to be upset about that!

@eclectech late to the game, but moho is being adopted or tested by a lot of companies. basically went flash-->toonboom-->possibly moho. Depends on your use case, but toonboom is buggy af, and their salesman wreck my head.

@eclectech Totally valid. Fuck Adobe.

@eclectech have you decided what program to use now? Can we go together? Maybe learning something new together isn't as daunting?

@eclectech Not a small thing at all for you and other Animate users. (OK, not like some of the horrors in the larger world, but still pretty significant in your daily life.)

I thought of you as I read this:
https://mastodon.social/@mcc/116002642833554176