Farewell, FLASH! You and I have walked through the era

[[158144]]

The Flash era is over! This message flashed on WeChat Moments, like a dim fire, pulling my thoughts back to the past - those were the green years I spent with Flash.

One spring more than ten years ago, I originally planned to go to Guangdong to work after the Chinese New Year, but I changed my mind before leaving and delayed my departure. The reason was that I was not sure whether I could find a job, and my heart was often empty. My intuition told me that with the skills I had now, I was still lacking in finding a job outside, and I should improve something!

Although I have mastered PHOTOSHOP and Coreldraw in the past year, it should not be too difficult to find a job if I master these two killer tools. But I don’t feel good about using Coreldraw, mainly because it is closely related to printing, and I don’t have the opportunity to contact the application knowledge in this area. Fortunately, two months before the New Year, I had the opportunity to access the Internet, and I learned at the first time that companies outside need a lot of people who know how to make web pages. To make a web page, you need to master the three major softwares: photoshop, dreamweaver and FLASH. I spent some time learning and mastering dreamweaver, and I also spent some time before the New Year to get familiar with FLASH. Now I know what I lack, which should be to strengthen the use and proficiency of FLASH.

What should I do? I need a computer for practice. I thought of a classmate who I used to be close to. I heard that he opened a typing shop in the city. So I went to him and begged him to let me use his computer when he was not working. He agreed.

I mainly spent two to three hours at night practicing FLASH at his place. At that time, there were no FLASH books to refer to. My learning materials came from the web tutorial that came with the flash installation CD. The tutorial was written by a Taiwanese and was very easy to understand. After practicing for a period of time, I felt that FLASH was not only fun, but also easy to learn. I could easily make some animations based on examples and understand the thinking and principles behind animation production. After about two weeks of practice, I felt at ease in my heart, so I stopped occupying the resources and time of that classmate and set out to venture into the outside world.

I was able to learn FLASH in a relatively short period of time. I think there are three reasons:

1. I learned the FLASH4.0 version. The software interface at that time was simple and unpretentious, the functions were direct and clear, and it was equipped with easy-to-learn and practical practice examples. It was not difficult to become familiar with and master the basic operations.

2. I have used PHOTOSHOP image processing software and CORELDRAW vector drawing software before, and I also had an unsuccessful experience in learning 3D animation. When I tried to understand some core concepts of FLASH, I felt that they were familiar and there was no high threshold to overcome.

3. Clear your mind and study hard. Don’t think about anything else except studying.

Of course, it was not easy to find a job. When I was walking around the streets trying to sell myself, FLASH was always on my resume; I tried my best to practice FLASH whenever I had the chance to use a computer. Later, I created a web page with FLASH animation on the spot during an interview, which gave me the opportunity to work at a Taiwanese Internet company in Shenzhen. My main job was to create websites for clients.

At that time, the websites I made for clients had to have a FLASH introductory animation on the homepage. Only after the animation was played could the real homepage of the website be entered, otherwise the client would not pay for it. During the more than two years I worked in that company, I made no less than a hundred client websites, and almost every website used FLASH to some extent - the animations I made were either simple or complex, and some were short or long. I was very good at using FLASH, and practice made perfect, so I was able to complete the production very quickly.

There are two things worth remembering about FLASH during this period:

1. I participated in the first Shenzhen web design competition and won the third place in the amateur group as a student (I studied software development at the Beijing University Jade Bird Shenzhen Center on Saturdays and Sundays at that time). One of the important reasons for winning the award was that I was able to complete a complete website in a very short time, and the top was also equipped with FLASH animation to add luster. Thanks to the training at work, as mentioned earlier, my production speed was very fast. I remember that when the competition was over, I saw regret on the faces of many people around me: because many of the things they made on their computers were still half-finished.

2. We used FLASH to produce animated promotional ads for Beida Jade Bird Shenzhen Regional Center. These ads were played on the TV screens on the computer book floor of Shenzhen Book City for a long time.

Personally, I prefer to design advertisements with FLASH, and I try to strengthen my practice in this area at work. Even so, I am not a flasher. Flashers are those who are crazy about FLASH animation production. I remember seeing a person named Border Town Wanderer on the Internet at that time. He often held flasher gatherings in Guangzhou. Later, I often visited the website Flash Empire. This website should also be created by Border Town Wanderer. I don’t remember it very clearly. In addition, a Hong Kong team used FLASH to create the SHOW GOOD Dahua Three Kingdoms series of animations. It is very popular on the Internet. I often watch it and often make myself laugh. There is also a "Little Broken Boy" animation created by a person named Picker. The picture is as amazing as an animated movie, which makes me feel that the creativity and productivity of FLASH are unimaginable. In fact, I have also tried hard to make myself embark on the road of animation production, but unfortunately I have not studied art and cannot draw by hand. There is no professional animation training institution on the market for further study, so I did not embark on the road of flashers. My specialty is to combine FLASH, photoshop, and dreamweaver to mass-produce web pages.

Later, FLASH was acquired by ADOBE and became its own product, which was constantly updated. Later, Jobs announced that FLASH would be abandoned in the Apple mobile phone system. Later, the following information was published:

"On December 2, 2015, according to foreign media reports, Adobe issued a statement encouraging developers to use new web standards, such as HTML5, and stop using Flash. At the same time, Flash was renamed Animate CC, and the original name Flash Professional CC was abandoned."

Although I used FLASH relatively early and was very familiar with it, as FLASH focused on enhancing software programming functions during its development (with each new version of flash, its action script function was always enhanced, and even the syntax changed, making it difficult to adapt), my FLASH production technology level stagnated at the level of 2005 - the action script language was too difficult for me to learn, and in that year, I gradually shifted from technology to marketing and distanced myself from FLASH, but that is a story for later.

The enhancement of Action script in FLASH is not necessarily a bad thing. As a result, FLASH is rarely used to make web pages. Instead, it becomes the main tool for interactive advertising and small game development. It is getting further and further away from web design and is slowly fading out of the main stage.

I think the decline of FLASH has something to do with the following three reasons:

1. The rise of SEO has brought about a change in website concepts. SEO has made websites pay more attention to content and inclusion, and to the marketing of websites, rather than fancy animations. FLASH animation content cannot be crawled by search engines. If FLASH is used extensively on the homepage of a website, it will cause a waste of resources and there will be no chance to improve the overall competitiveness of the website in search engines. When the concept of SEO became popular, the FLASH guide animations that used to run on the homepage of the website basically disappeared.

2. Jobs ordered Apple to refuse to use FLASH on mobile platforms. This move dealt a fatal blow to FLASH, which dominated PCs and had no chance to perform on mobile platforms, and of course could no longer repeat its former glory.

3. The rise of HTML5. HTML5 has been very popular in the past two years. The page animations made with HTML5 can completely replace FLASH. It is cross-platform and more secure than FLASH. When HTML5 is prosperous, FLASH is declining.

Today, I still have FLASH installed on my computer, and I will not uninstall it. But what kind of opportunity will make me reopen it?

Time has passed, things have changed, and the ambitions of a king have finally become a fantasy. FLASH, please go! Remember that you and I once walked through the era together.