I’ve been with Flash for fifteen years.
As a kid, my first encounter with Adobe was Photoshop and ImageReady.
Later, Macromedia was acquired by Adobe, the web trio got the Adobe prefix, and only then did I really spend years revolving around Adobe.
My dream used to be “to become a Flash master. To deliver outstanding web user interaction solutions.” It feels like I’ve already beaten the game, graduated, and headed off to a new battlefield.
Over the past decade, from the rise of AS3 to the whole of Flash being toppled, watching Adobe slowly bury Flash in the mobile internet era, I’ve stopped feeling anything.
Anyway, there’s nowhere left that needs Flash. Anyway, there’s nowhere left that needs the entire Adobe suite.
At least ES6 is mature enough now — standard, cross-platform, full-stack. There’s ReactNative for apps, with UI that’s convenient and pleasant to use.
There’s Unity’s ultra-convenient workflow — even sketching things out with the art team, I do that right inside the Unity editor now. It launches far faster than Flash.
There’s Sketch — super convenient, fast, vector-based, with a huge asset library that keeps up with the times, quick to launch, and lighter, cheaper, and better-looking than PS and AI.
The only thing I can’t bear to let go of is IntelliJ IDEA, which I’ve used for years — this thing is a godsend for writing AS3, and of course it can handle Egret and Laya too. The days when installing IDEA alone got you half the world are gone.
Now I need WebStorm to write JSX with ReactNative; Consulo to write C# with Unity; Android Studio to write Java native code; AppCode to write C++ and iOS native code;
From the crappy FlexBuilder, to using FDT for many years, to finally switching to the JetBrains suite — the world keeps getting better and better, enough to handle everything coding-related.
My feelings about Flash are actually pretty complicated. Now that I’m getting older, I can’t help being nostalgic. I miss playing Red Alert, Age of Empires, StarCraft as a kid, and later Warcraft. I also miss the earliest Flash MTV that swept through everything, “Northeasterners Are All Living Lei Feng,” and countless episodes of South Park.
But I also know that everything in memory is better left in memory. Nothing lasts forever.
To be honest, Adobe is truly not a company I like — Disney is, Apple is. Adobe ended my Flash complex but offered no replacement. It’s just a weak presence in the face of the times, like most entities. In the end, it too will become a memory — maybe even before I retire.
Goodbye Flash, goodbye Adobe.