Every so often over the past 15 years I've had this exact thought, "The world needs something which is exactly like flash. Not kind of like flash, exactly like flash."

A whole generation of people learned how to create art, games, music, animations, using flash, and the same kind of tool hasn't existed since then.

I think Minecraft and Roblox replaced flash for the new generations.

I agree, I love Flash more than nearly any other piece of software that has ever been on the computer, and it's one of the few things I miss about moving to Linux away from Windows.

I can still run Flash MX 2004 via Wine and play with that there, so it's not "lost media" or anything, but what I want is something as close to Flash as possible, that runs on Linux, and gets regular updates, and that doesn't require I subscribe to it for forever.

I have a perpetual license to ToonBoom (that I bought when they were still doing perpetual licenses), and ToonBoom is very cool software, but it's purely an animation software. I also have a license to Scirra Construct 2, and that's pretty neat as well, but in my mind that's basically a game engine. Flash was this cool, weird hybrid of both a game engine and artistic software that I haven't found a good replacement for.

With Flash, you could make a cartoon without touching ActionScript. It was designed around animation. If you wanted to extend the cartoon you could then add code, piecemeal, and if you wanted to make a full game then you could make a full game. It was great.

> I think Minecraft and Roblox replaced flash for the new generations.

I think this is the biggest shift. Minecraft starting out as a .jar file allowed for reverse engineering and modding support became a huge part of its "culture". Coupled with artists focusing on spritesheets, you got to have that same Newgrounds online underground scene but for the next generation of kids.

Roblox is takes a similar place now that Minecraft is ~15 years old and all "grown up". Maybe once Roblox hits that similar fate this new Flash will be ready to fill its shoes.