I have a question for a niche group of people.

Claudius

@eclectech lottie (https://lottiefiles.com/ ) has taken over a tiny part of what Flash did, I think. HTML5+JS has taken over another part of what Flash did. Unity3d has taken over a bit of what Flash did.

But there's still, in my humble opinion, a sizeable hole that never got filled.

Claudius

@eclectech also for animations, I think friction is slowly but steadily shaping up: https://friction.graphics/ here's a tutorial series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0ZBRmGxWXQ

eclectech

@claudius Yeah, it seems such a shame that dislike of the default output format seems to have cast the entire setup as a Bad Thing.

I suppose arguably Animate is still there, but that's not cost effective for most people wanting to make stuff for fun.

eclectech

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

Carolyn

@eclectech Another reason to hate their subscription model.

Play Ball and Fight Fascists

@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.

Matt Round

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

SunnJax 🥾🏳️‍🌈 :Fire_Pride:

@eclectech Ugh

The Frog

@eclectech

I think it's a fairly big thing!

Carolyn

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

eLearningTechie

@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.

eLearningTechie

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

eLearningTechie

@eclectech Good luck!

Vijinx 🐦‍🔥

@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

Fabian de B. aka Hampelman

@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.

MxBikil is Spoopy🎃 and Gay!❄️

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

JORD

@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.

Sindarina, Edge Case Detective

@eclectech Totally valid. Fuck Adobe.

Raisca Gamor

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

Jeri Dansky

@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