Adobe Animate - does it worth?

[yanmoura]

Hi all!

I worked a LOT with Flash in the past and have made several AS2 and AS3 applications (mostly games and a few online tools). With all the popularity loss of Flash my customers started to ask me less and less projects and I ended abandoning Flash around 8 years ago or so. Now only use Flash once in a while to make maintenance of ONE old tool that a customer of mine still uses internally in his company. After that I have made a couple jobs using HTML5 libraries such as CreateJS. Well, it works but I really lack the great Flash IDE and the easiness of dealing with movie clips.

Recently I have heard about "Adobe Animate" and went after this. The least I saw online (and it wasn't too much) I can tell that it looks like a LOT Flash interface to me and I "understood" that use it is like using good old Flash and the difference is that instead to generate a SWF it generates a pure HTML5 file (putting us Flashers kind of back to the game).

Before I spend a lot of time on it (I am an old fart so time is critical to me) questions are:

1) how much true is in it?
2) is this solid and reliable (ahem!) as Flash?
3) it uses AS3 or it is a whole new coding grammar?
4) any further comments about AA?

Thanks!

[AS3.0]

With adobe animate you can publish html5/js i prefer write js by hand without libraries but you can also get the weekly sdk updates that bring new features to export as3 to mobile packing. To sell the as3 programmed desktop/ios/android app is pretty difficult to make sales on the store. Not enough shares there alone maybe to make noticeable sales the developer should promote with business cards at many locations such as downtown, subways, beaches, populated areas not always at the same spot to promote the %100 completed professional application and get it sold for $1

[yanmoura]

pretty difficult to make sales on the store.

I see. Hopefully I am not interested on sell apps. I think that's too much competition for too little rewarding (IMO).



I would be more focused on get back to the industry of writing custom stuff for websites. I have made a lot of this in the past (mostly online games) but with the decline of Flash and the rocket growing of Apple crap (generating a loss of interest in clients that didn't want to keep the iPeople out) I ended quitting the party.

Anyway, the thing was really very good until the international crisis of 2008. I took part of a nice commercial website called Rent-A-Coder where people posted projects looking for coders to make them come true and to get jobs were literally as easy as to answer to the posts with a quotation. I used to pick 2-3 new projects A DAY and I got a lot of money by the time. Then it came 2008, RAC was gone, several of my clients bankrupted and everything became very bad suddenly. By then luckily I got a great regular online job (that I still keep) and just forgot about freelancing.



But lately I have developed a sudden interest on do something different and it was when I got aware of Adobe Animate and got animated (pun intended!) with the perspective of doing cool AS3 things and publish them in HTML5. Then I can just pick my rusty experience of AS3 and JS from the bag and start having some fun (and who knows be paid for this). The only problem is that I have no idea how receptive the market is currently. With people abandoning computers and migrating massively to mobiles maybe I just became too old for this new market style.



I don't know. I will play a bit with AA and see what happens without any expectations. Anyway I made a quick stupid test yesterday with a blue square twinning from left to right - duh. Looks good but now I have to make something heavier with a lot of animation and interaction to see how it gets. Will try to make a simple animated game to see.

[AS3.0]

Really when you are converting as3 to js/html5 that's for your old projects that you want to port to something native, but if you plan on typing current as3 projects and than porting it to html5 that's not going to be the most light weight as typing the js/html5 yourself on a text editor, because all the libraries they include that maybe your site wont really need, typing html5/js is generally free and if you can use a text editor you should but the main focus is really the faster languages like as3, you should compile as3 to swf/apk/ipa/exe like on my channel you can see that it is possible to extend the language to add Bluetooth/chromeless/notification bar messages or for any new os updates you can learn to write the extension plugins yourself to activate new os features that get released so as3 is never really deprecated and when its very old you can still activate new features if you implement them.

[yanmoura]

I see...

Well, I have tried some third party libraries like Phaser and CreateJS. They are OK but honestly it's very tedious and time consuming to do everything in code using only a plain text editor, specially after to have tasted a rich development tool like Flash.

I really enjoyed in Flash is the graphic part, the timeline, the movie clips objects, etc: you just create your graphics and start coding to control it. As far as I know doesn't exist any HTML5 class to access Flash objects, and since (as per what you said) the AS3 code converted to HTML5 is crappy it seems obvious to me that is pointless to use Adobe Animate.

That's a shame.



PS: Thank you for putting a strong light over that!

[AS3.0]

Yes. I like toolkit for createjs plugin for adobe animate. But i make a full site better in a basic text editor.. Notepad, notepad++, or what mod whispers uses "lamp" which is a online webhosting kit that contains a text editor all which are free alternatives. Anyways if you get cc we can connect our creative cloud storage to build some apps together and sell, just hire a promoter/someone we know to give out the apps business cards after for $8/hr to get some shares started