On February 11, 2016, Flash CC was replaced by Animate CC. Ofcourse, Flash isn’t really gone, it’s just been renamed Animate CC. It’s adifferent name, but under the skin, it’s almost exactly the same as Flash. I’mnot going to compare this to putting lip gloss on a porcine mammal, but AnimateCC is still Flash CC.
Animate CC can still be used to make Flash files and theprogram saves files in the FLA format as the default. It also can save in the XFLformat, which is called an “Animate Uncompressed Document.” It’s still an FLAfile. If you want to create a SWF from your work, you export. Publish createsan HTML5 <canvas> document: a JavaScript file, an html file, and a mediafolder.
This name change raises the question: Why would you continueto make Flash files? In this article, I hope to help you answer that questionfor your own situation, and to give you some alternatives that in my opinionare better than continuing to make Flash files.
I want to note something. HTML5 is exactly the same as HTML4 and HTML3 and so on; you get the idea. The difference is there are 21 more commands that came available when browsers became HTML5-compliant. Mostly HTML5 became an environment where you could create things and put them directly into the browser. When you can create video, animation, and motion graphics output to a <canvas> container for your web, you export your project as HTML. The program you’re using writes an HTML file along with a CSS file and a file with your assets (images) and a custom JavaScript file for your media. You then go over to Dreamweaver (or code it yourself if you like pain) and insert the media on the page you are building for a browser. Or go to Captivate or Presenter or whatever you have that can make its own HTML5 pages, embed what you’ve done into your Captivate (or whatever) file, and then put everything else around it. Voila! The index.html or whatever page will read everything. Maybe hard to understand the first time around, but it’s very easy to do. |
Now what?
Under the skin, Animate CC not only looks, but moreimportantly acts, very much like the last iteration of Flash (even the iconcolor is the same) with a few new features. As development software for youreLearning, Flash has been dying since 2010 when Steve Jobs said his mobiledevices would no longer support Flash. In the last nine or so months, GoogleChrome and Firefox desktop apps have stopped allowing Flash in their browserswithout approval from the user. I generally don’t allow Flash on my computersince it hits performance more than most other programs that display media ormedia-rich content.
More importantly, Flash is a major security risk. You can’tuse it anyway if you create mobile learning since neither iOS nor Androiddevices can use it. Flash was great when it was all new and shiny, but thatgoes back to 1996. The luster has long since worn off. Back then, it was thebest program (the same thing is now called an app) for creating media-rich andcomplex content. So what do you do now?
Since the early 2000s Flash has played a larger and largerrole in eLearning because it allowed eLearning developers to create wonderful,media-rich content for their learning audience. Since Flash uses Action Script(a very Java-like programming language), the “back end” of Flash allowedcomplex interactions between elements in your eLearning projects. It also enabledlinking to SCORM on your LMS. In fact, many Flash eLearning developers neverused the GUI that comes with Flash, but instead exclusively used Action Scriptto build their training modules.
ActionScript is a Java-like language (not JavaScript) thathas great extensibility. That means you can create eLearning assets that are programmedto react to the learner rather than take them along a timeline. Frankly,slides, no matter how complex they are, don’t represent a timeline other than theconcept of clicking on something to move something else into or out of a slide.Other Adobe programs use ActionScript too, but they don’t have theextensibility that Flash has, uh, had. Enough history. So what can you domoving forward?
What to do with your old Flash eLearning
The answers are actually pretty easy. First, you cancontinue to work in Animate CC just like you did in Flash. It functions exactlythe same. You can still even work with .fla files and output .swf files. The realproblem for eLearning developers and training departments is the investment inFlash-created content over the years. How do you curate that content movingforward?
Well, second, Animate CC can also create output for HTML5<canvas>. So how can you convert your current Flash files to HTML5. It’sactually pretty easy, if you have Animate CC. Open your FLA file and “Publish”it as HTML5 document. There. You’re done. Maybe. It’s unclear if all theinteractivity, scripting, and tracking will follow it over.
Alternatively, if all you have are the SWF files, there areseveral other choices. Swiffy,a Google program, can do it as well as almost anything as long as you usedAction Script 2.0 and SWF 8. There’s also SWF to HTML5 Movie Maker. Sweet. Or if you don’t have the resources in-house to dothis, you can also use some outside development companies to do the work foryou. One little note: there’s also a part of the HTML5 specification that’scalled WebGL (Web Graphics Library) It’s really a JavaScript API for creating 2-Dand 3-D graphics natively in a modern web browser. It’s placed inside of the<canvas> container.
But how about going forward with new projects?
Moving forward
You can’t look back. If you’ve been depending on Flash tomake the rich-media part of your learning, you’ll have to stop. I know manycompanies that are still using Windows 7, and Windows 7 and Flash (evenre-named) together are a security nightmare. Do you hear that, IT departments?Developers should create in HTML5 for content creation and for delivery via the intranet or the Internet. There are manyproducts that do their publishing to HTML5 including Captivate, Articulateproducts, Presenter, Presenter Video Express, iSpring, and most development softwarethat has been using Flash over the years. Almost all offer the option to createHTML5 documents.
Advertising agencies that specialize in creating web adsfigured out that they couldn’t wait too long to create their new content. LastJune, AdvertisingAge published this article, advocating to ad agencies that they change their ads to<canvas> type ads, which means the ads can be any type of media at all.I’ve seen a lot of proof of this recently. Speedtest.net, a popular site wasfilled with Flash ads (the little red circles in Figure 1) last October. InFebruary, the only thing that required Flash (the big grey box with a puzzlesymbol) was Speedtest itself! Interestingly, there was an ad just last weekthat popped up in my browser with at least eightinstances of Flash running in it (Figure 3). My first thought was, “How retro”but my second thought was, “How dumb.”
Figure 1: This is the speedtest.net web page last November. Figure2 is the same page today. There are nine instances of Flash on this page. Thereis only one in Figure 2.
Figure2: The only Flash on this page is the test itself
Figure 3: This ad for a financial institution has eight instancesof Flash in it. Really?
Ads are not lessons. They are way simpler to create and onlyneed one click to activate. How many clicks are there in an eLearning lesson? Awhole lot more than an ad. eLearning lessons are orders of magnitude morecomplex. There is the click interactivity along with “behind the curtain” recordkeeping, score keeping, and progress along with other things that you need toprogram. In some industries, all that record keeping has to be validated. Farmore complex than creating an ad.
What are the alternatives?
First, you should ask yourself why you developed eLearning inFlash in the first place. Was it because everyone else was doing it? Or did youneed animation, along with evaluations, and course completion statistics, etc.,that were easier to produce with Flash?
If you were the former, step up to the plate and makeanimations, motion graphics, and videos part of your learning. Integrate visualconcepts into your work. If you’re in the latter group and love creatinganimations and motion graphics that learners can dive into, you’ll have tolearn some new tools, but at the end of the day, you’ll be creating andideating even more complex media.
How do you do it? There are lots of alternatives. However,there are no Swiss Army knife applications. Flash was thought of as one, butdevelopers still had to have a good knowledge of Photoshop at the least. I usethe Adobe CC suite along with Captivate, sometimes Storyline, Presenter, andPresenter Video Express. Why? They just work together well and I don’t have toworry about many other bits of software except for MS Office and all theplug-ins I have. And I do have a lot.
Most of my work is video and increasingly motion graphics. Ilive in an Adobe CC world of Premiere Pro, Photoshop, After Effects, andAudition. When I’m done with those, I start using Captivate, Presenter, andPresenter Video Express (two completely different products now) to integratethe stuff that moves along with the stuff that doesn’t. That said, I’m workingmore with Presenter Video Express just because it does a great job at what it’ssupposed to do—help you create green screens without a green screen, and savethe whole to an HTML5 <canvas> document.
How about a list?
The really cool thing about freeing yourself of Flash isthat you can create whatever you want for video, motion graphics, and otherrich content in a variety of programs and then incorporate them into yourAnimate document and output the whole lesson as HTML5 <canvas>. Butyou’ll have to deal more with a variety of software. Here are some tools thatyou can use to incorporate rich media of varying types into a lesson. I’m notadvocating one brand over another. That’s for you to decide. All these toolscan be used to make incredible eLearning; they work and they work well.
Vector-based tools
- Illustrator CC (Adobe’s vector-based files).
- CorelDraw, which is about the only competitor toIllustrator.
- A whole lot of other programs, some of which arefree, such as “Sketch”(online or for Mac), Xara, Inkscape. There are many more.
Pixel-based editors
- Photoshop, the oldest and probably most matureof all the programs
- Corel PhotoPaint, which has also been around foryears, but is not quite Photoshop on several levels
- ArtRage
- GIMP, which is the granddaddy of the freewareapps for doing pixel-based editing
- Xara Designer (and again the list goes on)
Motion-graphics tools
- After Effects. This is the big one. Nothingcomes close in the price range.
- Nuke
- Eyeon Fusion
- Anime Studio
- Blender
- Lightwave, and another long list of others
Video editingsoftware
- Premiere Pro
- Corel VideoStudio
- Nero Video
- YouTube editor
- VSDC editor, and of course many others
Those are the four categories of software that Flash CC andAnimate CC emulate in one form or another. You can incorporate parts of theseprograms into Animate CC. This is not an extensive list. But if you analyzewhat you do in your eLearning content creation, you might find yourself usingbits and pieces of all the above categories at one time or another.
eLearning developers really do create complex lessons withlots of interactions and movement, if they have the time to create a high levelof interactivity in their work. It’s always a matter of time vs. availabledollars, so you do what you can. While you can continue to develop your lessonsin Flash CC Animate CC, you now have a real variety to choose from and thatyou can drop into a <canvas> document. It could be a great thing foreLearning developers.
