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How does this analogy make sense though? Fireworks was, to Adobe, some third-rate app that Adobe had to acquire because they had acquired Flash, the thing they really cared about. Adobe certainly maintained Flash - anyone remember ActionScript 3?

In this Figma acquisition, Figma is the main prize. They're not just going to leave Figma to languish, no more than they left Flash to languish. Eventually Flash did die, yes, but that was more Apple crushing it than a direct decision of Adobe.




Adobe ran Flash into the ground. Flash was developing at such a rapid pace until it was acquired, and then quickly stagnated. Adobe too way too long to get Adobe Air performant and the tooling was abysmal.

If Flash was in capable hands, it would have become a major player in the game development space, which is where most of its strengths were.


> If Flash was in capable hands, it would have become a major player in the game development space, which is where most of its strengths were.

I don't understand what you mean here. Flash WAS a major player in the game development space. Flash games were dominant on the web for something like a decade, and a large part of that was post-Adobe acquisition.

Yes, they missed the boat on mobile, but that was more a function of Jobs putting his foot down on anything vaguely Flash-related.


And yet I still get jobs working in Flash, there's still no comparable program for frame-by-frame vector animation. A package that you can draw into but also rig puppets in. I'm rooting for Grease Pencil to catch up but really it's nowhere near in terms of fast usability.

That's not so say they didn't run it into the ground - I still remember the nightmare of CS5.


Indeed. I still build my game assets in Animate CC, export them with the Export Texture Atlas feature, and then have a custom built runtime play the animations in my game. It’s quite simple to build such a runtime for immediate mode rendering engines such HTML canvas, Monogame, Kha.




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