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After Twenty Years of Flash, Adobe Kills the Name (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: From January 2016, Adobe Flash will be renamed to 'Adobe Animate CC', killing one of the most unfortunate names in web security as the company pushes the product further and further to HTML5 output. Adobe's release about the update, which will form part of the annual Creative Cloud upgrade, states that a third of all material output from the program is now HTML5. The transitional HTML5 Adobe animation program Edge Animate will be replaced by the renamed Flash product.
they are not killing the flash name; the new version of their *creation* package is renamed to Animate from Flash Professional since it outputs HTML5 in addition to SWF; this is not related to the client side SWF ecosystem
They're renaming the authoring tool, which is currently known as Flash Professional CC. It appears that the Flash Player will remain just that.
This makes perfect sense, as Flash Professional CC is increasingly being used to generate media that targets HTML5, not Flash, as output. Renaming Flash Professional CC to Animate CC eliminates the whole need to do the song and dance of "we're talking about Flash the authoring environment, not Flash the plugin" to non-technical audiences.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Flash was originally created as an artist's tool - to allow streaming animation which didn't take up as much bandwidth by only transmitting backgrounds and sprites once and animating them on the client, rather than streaming raw video. For that purpose it's a fantastic tool, with several TV shows and animated movies still being created with it.
Flash didn't ask to become the de facto scripting language for the web. It only became that because the HTML standard lacked scripting and programming capability which Flash provided. It was a security disaster because it was only ever intended to be an artist's tool and little thought went into making it secure. If you want to blame someone, blame the folks in charge of the HTML standard. They dragged their feet for over a decade, and didn't update HTML to provide many of the capabilities Flash provided until HTML5. HTML 4.01 was standardized in Dec 1999. HTML 5 was standardized in Oct 2014. It should have been made standard in 2001-2003.