Trangram is a free one-stop platform to create, and share motion graphics and svg animations with a free built-in powerful editor which is a fusion of Adobe Illustrator and animation tools.
Back in the day I used to do quite a lot of Macromedia Flash work. It’s uncannily similar but a modern take.
I’ve often wondered why no one has come up with a new product in this space. I think the long term demise of Flash has put off anyone even trying.
There are so many great uses for animations on the web, even if we don’t need full blown user interfaces of them and intro screens like we did back in 2002.
IMO, Flash died because it didn't play nice with the conventions of the web. There were workarounds, but generally it broke all of the things HTML could do, like being searchable & selectable, navigable with a keyboard, built of code you could inspect, addressable with a direct link, even working with the browser's back button.
The actual animations and (sometimes) beautiful interfaces were not the problem. People generally loved that.
Generally there's no need for a new product in this space because CSS does everything Flash once did, but adheres to web conventions.
There probably is an opportunity, though. I'm not a motion graphics person - does Adobe Animate fit the bill at all? What do you think is missing today that we once had with Flash?
No. Generally, the missing features you mention were inconsequential to decision-makers (outside of some ideological devs) and many of them were being gradually addressed by Macromedia/Adobe anyway.
Flash died because Microsoft was agressingly nipping at Adobe on the commercial side with Silverlight, because standard bodies were finally chipping away at its feature advantages with long-needed improvements to HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and most impactfully of of all: because Steve Jobs decreed it.
The death knell for Flash sounded exactly when the market-revolutionizing iPhone refused to support altogether.
But all of that's just about the runtime platform. The posted app calls back to the Flash editor itself, which was extremely mature and powerul but had too much inertia to successfully pivot to targeting HTML or apps before Adobe would give up on it.
Later apps have come, but inevitably start far behind the features that Flash offered designers, animators, and developers at its peak.
Tell me you never used Flash by not telling me you've never used flash.
Flash's USP and core value proposition was the (IMO) fantastic IDE that you used to create flash apps and animations. It was exactly as technical as you needed it to be. As you upskilled you could do more things, but more importantly do the same things more elegantly. In stead of a manual animation you could script it out in AS3. I loved it and I'm really sad that I only entered the professional workforce as Flash was on it's way out.
Apple killed flash by not allowing it to run on their mobile devices. It's really as simple as that.
I think Apple claimed that Flash was too power hungry to run on a mobile device.
I was hired back in the day to convert a flash based app to a "Dynamic HTML" app. The flash developers all quit because they didn't want to work with HTML and Javascript. And this was all because the company wanted to support iPhones and iPads. And there were a lot of companies doing the same exact thing back then - abandoning Flash for HTML/Javascript/CSS.
I always thought Flash died because Apple didn't want people to be able to write and execute arbitrary code in an app on their phones. That it posed a security risk, a stability risk, and potentially a business risk (as it could allow people to circumvent the limitations they'd imposed on, say, distribution and payments). Is that wrong?
I think the GP is talking more about the authoring tools for Flash. You could do everything - graphics, animation, audio, video, scripting - in a single package that was relatively easy to use.
It's crazy to me they didn't see the value in porting actionscript to something that compiles to JS/HTML5, though adobe couldn't be trusted to see this potential obviously. If they had something like that ready in ~2011 it could have completely replaced HTML 5 canvas adoption
> IMO, Flash died because it didn't play nice with the conventions of the web. There were workarounds, but generally it broke all of the things HTML could do, like being searchable & selectable, navigable with a keyboard, built of code you could inspect, addressable with a direct link, even working with the browser's back button.
Add to the list that when we resized the window or went fullscreen the typical Flash app would keep its original size. A Flash app born for 800x600 screens wouldn't look well in a 1366x768 screen or 1080p ones. It became tiny as resolution increased and diagonals more or less didn't. Then Steve Jobs and battery life or removing a competing ecosystem.
There is a ton that flash did that CSS does not do, but it is more about the toolchain / dev environment for flash apps than the actual technical capabilities. It is very strange to me that no one has built "Flash but on Html5" yet.
There's a correlation between the death of Flash and the rise of mobile devices browsing. Flash was pixel-based and the whole paradigm doesn't really work for responsiveness.
I was going to suggest Rive too. I came across them when I was trying to figure out how Duolingo's animations were done, pretty cool tool.
For Trangram - it might help to link each of the examples in the "Explore & Get Inspired" section to the editor, allowing new users to avoid the "blank page" syndrome.
Totally agree! The major feature missing compared to Flash would be library and component support - i.e. the ability to create reusable animated graphics that you can drag onto the canvas (with infinite nesting).
i.e. you can animate a bird with flapping wings, then drag 3 copies onto your sky.
There's actually quite a few new tools that do "animation for the web". I'm sure there's a longer list but the ones I've used are rive, jitter, fable, and lottielab. Rive is interesting but the one I find myself coming back to is lottielab, it feels the most like the "spend 4 minutes playing around, but now I have something that looks really cool" that I used to get when using flash
Adobe’s Flash editor got renamed to Adobe Animate. People mostly use it now to export video but there is more than one HTML 5 viewer it will export for, these support most of what Flash supported except for a few unusual geometric primitives.
Airbnb's Lottie has a Web Player now I think? Make your animation in AE or Figma, export to "Lottie JSON" with players in JS, Swift, Kotlin & React Native.
Meaning you can still create all the animations and games, but then you will have to try to port it to js and canvas (via easeljs). And that did not work very nicely last time I tried it.
Oh, man. I just barely glanced at the features and the editor but - and I mean this in the best possible way - it looks like you've recreated Flash.
Regardless of what anyone thinks about the proprietary file format and Actionscript and the rendering engine,the actual Flash app itself was one of the best vector animation tools of all time, and when it died we lost something cool and useful.
I'm really looking forward to playing with this in depth. Great job, man!
It passed my first test: "Type hello world and make it bounce for 5 seconds."
The second test is: "save it as a gif" I could not do that because I need to create an account. I am weary of sites that lock in my work. Perhaps it would be a good hook-and-reel method to allow one grace save to ensure that what people create in an anonymous trial can be used somewhere else.
All my kids and I know how to use Paint Tool Sai because I trusted the software with our work. It was affordable and ran locally.
Great site. I'll pass the word around.
You can save to file ('export', to use Trangram's nomenclature) without creating an account. This includes Trangram's native .tg format, as well as animated GIF.
- Would be awesome to be able to open an existing animation (eg. like any of the ones showcased). It's a built overwhelming for a noobie opening up to a blank editor page.
Your suggestions are greatly appreciated. We're constantly looking for ways to enhance the user experience, and your input will definitely be taken into consideration.
Why compare Tangram to Adobe Illustrator when Adobe offers animation software in their suite? Adobe After Effects does motion graphics. Adobe Animate does animations for the web, or so I heard. How is Tangram closer to Illustrator than After Effects or Animate?
One quick comment: I was threatened and on the brink of being sued by one of Facebook's bigger law firms, because my domain was called "***gram.com" — I went through a couple of calls with them, and they confirmed that the only issue was the use of the word "gram". I tried to stick to my guns, knowing they had nothing (legally) on me, but eventually had to give in once they told me to research the ongoing cases they have with all the other domain owners (which you can all find online). Some of which have been going through lawyer-warfare for over three years (at the time). They basically said, if I have the power to sustain this, they would sue and we'll clear this in court, if I don't want to go through this, I should back off and use a different domain.
So, while I hate saying this, be warned, I was warned and ignored it, and eventually, no matter how tall you feel, that call may come quicker than you think. Keep a second domain around ready to go, make sure you can rebrand. Just my word of (super sad) advice.
Not that I don't believe what you're saying, but how is this a thing they could possibly expect to hold up as a trademark infringement? They literally own a single recently invented neologism of which neither the prefix nor the root is original. It seems to me that Instacart or Insta360 would be much more open to claims... honestly if it were me, I wouldn't hire a lawyer, just let them know to send me a letter what courthouse I should show up at with a dictionary.
> Not that I don't believe what you're saying, but how is this a thing they could possibly expect to hold up as a trademark infringement?
The worst part is that it doesn't even matter if they have a case or not. The mere threat of "Look at how much it'll cost you even if you're right" can be enough for people to pull back.
Recent relevant case is the Sony vs Bleem!, where Bleem! "won" but because of costs, Bleem! had to shut down anyway. So even if Sony lost the court case, they won because they shut down the group.
This exactly... I would represent myself, it would be fun.... and let Meta spend hundreds of thousands on lawyers. If I lost I would drag it out as long as possible and then if by some strange twist of fate I lost, I would declare bankruptcy and write a book about the whole thing.
Telegram has probably sufficient money, so that threatening them into doing what FB/Meta wants does not work. They only go after small enough fish, preying on the weaker.
Not sure I want to post my domain but a bit of research will get you there if you want to confirm it. An Austrian news outlet wrote about the threat when I was involved.
We built a system where the big players don't care if they are in the right.
The massive investments necessary to uphold the rights in front of court are what makes it possible for Meta to get through with this BS.
I am not sure if this is a problem that mainly manifests in the USA. I haven't heard of private parties or small companies shying back of a court case when they believe they are in the right in Europe.
Big companies can afford to - the point is not that Meta would win a case, it's that most people are too small to survive a case long enough to see it through to a win against Meta.
Only goes to show once more how despicable FB/Meta as an entity is and acts.
One possible course of action is starting a drama on social media (on not FB) and contacting EFF and such, to get support. Still there will be impact on ones social life and FB/Meta should be punished for making people's life shittier. They think they are too big to fail. I hope one day they will be split up or sued into compliance with some ethics, putting on some tight screws and supervision. This freak show must be stopped.
I think in the EU things might look a bit different, because there was some law against such obvious bullshit lawsuits. Something about "slap" or so in the name of that law? I don't recall exactly.
Wow. Adobe did such a great job destroying Flash that people be out there creating whole "Adobe Illustrator but for animation" software when Adobe already makes Adobe Illustrator but for animation.
Readit News
I’ve often wondered why no one has come up with a new product in this space. I think the long term demise of Flash has put off anyone even trying.
There are so many great uses for animations on the web, even if we don’t need full blown user interfaces of them and intro screens like we did back in 2002.
Great job!
The actual animations and (sometimes) beautiful interfaces were not the problem. People generally loved that.
Generally there's no need for a new product in this space because CSS does everything Flash once did, but adheres to web conventions.
There probably is an opportunity, though. I'm not a motion graphics person - does Adobe Animate fit the bill at all? What do you think is missing today that we once had with Flash?
Flash died because Microsoft was agressingly nipping at Adobe on the commercial side with Silverlight, because standard bodies were finally chipping away at its feature advantages with long-needed improvements to HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and most impactfully of of all: because Steve Jobs decreed it.
The death knell for Flash sounded exactly when the market-revolutionizing iPhone refused to support altogether.
But all of that's just about the runtime platform. The posted app calls back to the Flash editor itself, which was extremely mature and powerul but had too much inertia to successfully pivot to targeting HTML or apps before Adobe would give up on it.
Later apps have come, but inevitably start far behind the features that Flash offered designers, animators, and developers at its peak.
Tell me you never used Flash by not telling me you've never used flash.
Flash's USP and core value proposition was the (IMO) fantastic IDE that you used to create flash apps and animations. It was exactly as technical as you needed it to be. As you upskilled you could do more things, but more importantly do the same things more elegantly. In stead of a manual animation you could script it out in AS3. I loved it and I'm really sad that I only entered the professional workforce as Flash was on it's way out.
Flash died because both Apple and Microsoft wanted it dead. Possibly justifiably.
I think Apple claimed that Flash was too power hungry to run on a mobile device.
I was hired back in the day to convert a flash based app to a "Dynamic HTML" app. The flash developers all quit because they didn't want to work with HTML and Javascript. And this was all because the company wanted to support iPhones and iPads. And there were a lot of companies doing the same exact thing back then - abandoning Flash for HTML/Javascript/CSS.
It got killed because Apple stopped supporting it. That's the reason.
Don't SPAs do exactly this?
"Google and Yahoo to Search Inside Flash Files" (2008)
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C4...
It’s pretty much modern Macromedia Flash. Except a JS runtime, rather than plugin.
For Trangram - it might help to link each of the examples in the "Explore & Get Inspired" section to the editor, allowing new users to avoid the "blank page" syndrome.
i.e. you can animate a bird with flapping wings, then drag 3 copies onto your sky.
Or play a different animation of a subelement on mouseover e.g. bird.flapWings()
And quite some other things ..
This is not a flash replacement and also does not aim to be one.
I wish Microsoft PowerPoint built some of that so we could use it for light weight animations and story telling.
So sad that Adobe were unwilling / unable to just make it output html5 instead of swf. But Adobe so where software goes to die so…
Meaning you can still create all the animations and games, but then you will have to try to port it to js and canvas (via easeljs). And that did not work very nicely last time I tried it.
https://www.wickeditor.com/#/
Regardless of what anyone thinks about the proprietary file format and Actionscript and the rendering engine,the actual Flash app itself was one of the best vector animation tools of all time, and when it died we lost something cool and useful.
I'm really looking forward to playing with this in depth. Great job, man!
The second test is: "save it as a gif" I could not do that because I need to create an account. I am weary of sites that lock in my work. Perhaps it would be a good hook-and-reel method to allow one grace save to ensure that what people create in an anonymous trial can be used somewhere else.
All my kids and I know how to use Paint Tool Sai because I trusted the software with our work. It was affordable and ran locally. Great site. I'll pass the word around.
Some suggestions though:
- Would be awesome to be able to open an existing animation (eg. like any of the ones showcased). It's a built overwhelming for a noobie opening up to a blank editor page.
- Could also consider putting a tutorial video
Anyways I'll have to play around with this.
Well done
Any chance of Lottie export? I think I would use this if there was.
So, while I hate saying this, be warned, I was warned and ignored it, and eventually, no matter how tall you feel, that call may come quicker than you think. Keep a second domain around ready to go, make sure you can rebrand. Just my word of (super sad) advice.
Looks great though!
The worst part is that it doesn't even matter if they have a case or not. The mere threat of "Look at how much it'll cost you even if you're right" can be enough for people to pull back.
Recent relevant case is the Sony vs Bleem!, where Bleem! "won" but because of costs, Bleem! had to shut down anyway. So even if Sony lost the court case, they won because they shut down the group.
Dead Comment
Because telegram is still out there.
https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2016/dec/02/battle...
I don’t see how even Facebook could have an issue with “telegram” being used commercially, but I wouldn’t be totally surprised if they did.
And, I just had a look, here’s an article by someone (not me) who seemed to experience the exact same threat: https://killdozer.medium.com/facebooks-shame-o-gram-8e71106c...
Dead Comment
One possible course of action is starting a drama on social media (on not FB) and contacting EFF and such, to get support. Still there will be impact on ones social life and FB/Meta should be punished for making people's life shittier. They think they are too big to fail. I hope one day they will be split up or sued into compliance with some ethics, putting on some tight screws and supervision. This freak show must be stopped.
I think in the EU things might look a bit different, because there was some law against such obvious bullshit lawsuits. Something about "slap" or so in the name of that law? I don't recall exactly.
Honestly, that's incredible.