Flash Questions and Tags to Animate

Question

As of yesterday Adobe has renamed their Flash product to Animate

Official Release: Welcome Adobe Animate CC, a new era for Flash Professional

At the time of writing this I didn't do any extensive searching but a quick search for Flash on GD.SE returns 420 results. We also have adobe-flash which currently has 84 questions in it (seems we're not very good at tagging things).

While Flash has never been a significant portion of our questions it will arise, perhaps even more if more people revisit it in its new form as Animate. The product launches in January, so we've got time to discuss and decide on what to do. It isn't clear from what I've read how long Adobe Flash will still exist within the CC realm, that initial press release simply states,

Note: When the release becomes available in January, it will be listed as “Adobe Animate CC” in the Creative Cloud desktop application. When you install or update Animate CC, it will be found on your computer as Adobe Animate CC 2015, not Adobe Flash CC 2015.

Previous versions of Flash Professional prior to January 2016 will continue to be available.

Which means it might no longer receive updates but still exist for a long time as Flash, while only new installs will be completely lacking in Flash.

How should we proceed?

Answer 1

I suggest creating a new tag, adobe-animate, making adobe-flash a synonym of that, with adobe-animate the new primary tag.

Rationale:

• For several years now, Flash has really only been used for building then rendering animations. All old questions about using Flash to build animations will be relevant to people using Adobe Animate, since the underlying software isn't changing that much.
• This way makes our back catalog future-proof. Adobe Animate will quickly become the more common search term. The bodies of old questions will probably contain the word "Flash" so both sets of search terms will be covered this way.
• Questions about using Flash to build websites, web apps, World Wide Web Page introductions... these are all ancient history now. If they end up with a less-than-appropriate tag, meh, no loss; and they might be relevant to someone doing a similar thing for a different reason.

• Actionscript had its own tag anyway. It's not dead, strictly, it can still be used in the context of dynamic animation / generative art.

  • So a question about actionscript in the context of generating an animation according to rules that was tagged with adobe-flash and actionscript will now be perfectly tagged.
  • A question about actionscript in the context of making a web game or applet, meh, who cares, it's doing no harm as a historical curiosity and maybe someone will find it useful in the context of some generative-art based animation they're building, or if export-to-HTML5 ever becomes good.
• Doing it like this, we don't need to really do any work.

Answer 2

Leave it as Flash since past versions of the software will be known as Flash and can be referenced as-such. Any software using the newer version should have the tag Animate. In the wiki description it can be noted that this is a precursor of Adobe Flash and we could point to the tag adobe-flash