I use Adobe Illustrator daily at a very high level and have about 25y of source files in its private format, as well as a bunch of plugins I rely on. How well can Linux deal with running a version of it written in this decade?
Inkscape is not an option, nor is anything involving importing PDF/SVG, those have to expand a huge ton of stuff that's represented much more compactly in an .AI file. It's about as large a difference as that between an executable file and its source code.
I don't think there is an answer. The best you can do is probably running Windows in a VM and limiting its use to applications that you really cannot replace. It's been a while since I used a VM on Linux, but VMware had a thing called Unity Mode where you can have application windows from the VM on your Linux desktop:
https://www.vectorpea.com/ and https://www.photopea.com/ are the lowest barrier to useable alternatives. You can even save them offline and convert to PWA, with very little friction. vectorpea and photopea should handle your .ai files admirably.
Inkscape, Affinity, other open source alternatives exist, but have a remarkably different UI and don't capitalize on your muscle memory.
The feature overlap is bordering on complete, but there are some Adobe Illustrator only perks, for sure. Most of it you can make up for with any of the frontier image AI models.
There are plugins - if you're well versed in how they work, converting between AI and vectorpea should also be a piece of cake with AI.
Hahaha no, I spent several minutes waiting for the 184m .ai file I was working on today to upload to Photopea. It displayed something that looked like my art for a half a second before crashing the browser tab so hard that its address bar went blank.
There are plugins - if you're well versed in how they work, converting between AI and vectorpea should also be a piece of cake with AI.
I'm an artist, not a prompt jockey. My interest in spending even a minute of my life trying to convince a plagarism engine to spit out something half as refined as Astute's plugins for Illustrator is absolutely zero.
The same way. For me the proper use of emojis is in reactions, to cut down on brief responses that cause clutter and undesirable notifications. I am less welcoming of them in the middle of a message, where they don't serve that purpose.
The newest news post on this barebones site is from 2023, announcing the MacOS downloads. On the news page there's two other posts; the oldest one is from 2022, and talks about a complete rewrite of the code. I think this fork looks pretty dead.
I mean if you're the kind of person who'd happily skip out on two major versions worth of bugfixes, updates, and new features in favor of the right source-code license, then sure I guess it's a better choice.
Approximately a quarter century of editor UI muscle memory in everyone who's used Flash/Animate professionally. And a quarter century of people being used to the precise quirks of how Flash/Animate organizes the parts for a cartoon. And a quarter century of source files in a private format that can only be read and understood by Flash/Animate.
Animation studios. I know for a fact that Teen Titans was animated in Flash/Animate for its entire life, for instance; that’s directly from a former co-worker who was the animation director there. Lots of small productions, too. Animate is a lot cheaper than Toon Boom Harmony so tons of hobbyists use it.
The only difference between Animate and Flash is that SWF export got dropped eventually. And a haphazard smattering of new features got added.
You don’t play FLAs. You load them into the editor and output SWFs. Or various video formats. There are reverse engineered SWF players, most prominently Ruffle, but this is the first I’ve heard of anyone parsing FLA files.
FLA is the source format, it is to a SWF (or other video file exported from the editor) as a PSD is to a JPEG, or a .c file to an executable program compiled with all debug info off.
so the story is that Flash basically disappeared from the web, but evolved into a tool to do more general/extensive animation (Animate) that continues to be used today even though the output is (essentially) never .swf files? is that more or less correct?
Flash started life as a general animation tool with a highly-compressible vector output format and a browser plugin to play them. And maybe some basic interactivity, I never touched it until version 4, when it definitely had pretty rich interactive capabilities even though you had to program it all via repeatedly hitting a dropdown menu with all the commands in it. 5 was a big improvement on that front with freeform textboxes instead.
Flash kept being used for animation while also being used for an increasingly large amount of interactive stuff on the web and desktop. Adobe bought Macromedia pretty much entirely to get it and started trying to build a write-once, run-anywhere programming environment out of it. Like Electron, with all its faults of being a resource hog with the added bonus of regular security holes that only Adobe could fix at a snail's pace.
Apple decided not to let the SWF player onto the iPhone's app store, officially citing the resource hog and security hole problems. People stopped using Flash to make interactive experiences. YouTube stopped delivering video as a Flash player streaming Flash's streaming video format. People kept on using it to animate.
Some time after this Adobe renamed Flash to Animate. People kept on using it to animate. I didn't, I'd quit animating by then.
Some time after that Adobe removed the ability to export SWF files. People kept on using it to animate.
And some time after that Adobe said "fuck it we're done with this thing, we've barely been adding any new features for a while, we're gonna stop supporting it and turn off the auth servers". People who were still using it to animate screamed. Loudly. And Adobe turned around within a day and said "uh okay well I guess we'll, uh, keep the auth servers running and, uh, maintain a skeleton team to fix bugs for a while".
One month after that, some dude made a post on Newgrounds - one of the major online centers for Flash stuff, both during the 2000's boom and the modern day - about his clone of the Flash editor, that he claims is capable of reading Flash source files. And here we are.
tl;dr: pretty much yes except it was always an animation tool from the very first days
A lot of people - including studios who use it for projects that can take years to complete - were very unhappy at the prospect of having the only tool that can read their mountains of FLA files (the file format the Flash/Animate editor uses, and used to compile into a SWF) stop working because Adobe turned off the auth servers. Adobe has pulled back to "okay we're, uh, putting it in maintenance mode, expect no new features, ever, just security patches".
If you follow their mea culpa link, it says they're keeping (a type of) support.
> Adobe Animate is in maintenance mode for all customers...
> Maintenance mode means we will continue to support the application and provide ongoing security and bug fixes, but we are no longer adding new features.
Of course, in my experience, such a lifeline never lasts much longer than the furor that earned it...
Yeah, if I was in a Animate studio I sure would be putting some energy for the entire last month into finding a good crack for it so we could deal with our old files, and talking about our plans for how to deal with the major hit the production pipeline would take when we picked a new animation program and started retraining everyone on it.
A lot of people made the choice to use proprietary tools for their creative work flow, rather than making do with and pushing for better open source equivalents.
I have some sympathy for them - I am sure they felt it was the only real choice at the time - but not a whole lot.
There were zero open-source options at the time. Flash/Animate was the only digital ink-n-paint solution that was even vaguely affordable to the hobbyist or small studio for many years. Most studio-quality 2D programs were proprietary solutions developed in big studios like Disney.
People started using Flash for professional work around 1995. "Open source" barely existed as a concept then, Wikipedia tells me the name "open source" was coined in 1998 and it took a while before anyone but programmers gave even half a damn about it.
The first open-source studio-quality 2D animation package I know of was OpenToonz from 2016, which was a relicensing of a commercial package that dates back to the late eighties or the early nineties - Wikipedia just mentions v3 from 1993.
But anyway now there is a dude working on an open-source Flash clone that can read the editor source files, so all these people you have next to no sympathy for have something to celebrate.
I was introduced to "free software" and the GPL in 1986, as a PhD student at the European Molecular Biology Lab (Heidelberg).
Your historical revisionism doesn't sit well. Yes, "open source" came later because some people didn't like the specifics of the GPL and wanted a term that could describe "source available" software under a variety of license. But by 1998, I'd already been contributing to GPL'ed projects for more than a decade.
I'm well aware of the lack of free/libre alternatives to Flash. But that wasn't my point at all. I'm not saying that people failed by choosing Flash over some (mythical) free/libre alternative. I'm saying they failed by choosing Flash, period.
Before proprietary software, there were almost no creative tools that were proprietary. Nobody bought proprietary paint, or proprietary paint brushes, or proprietary table saws, or propriety anything. The software showed up, and everyone was so gaga about what you could do with it that they just forget about the fact that XYZ Corp. controlled the tools 100%, and dived in. There were people warning them, but those people were ignored.
The use of em dashes is a human right. I ask that people not discriminate against em-dash users—we should be a protected class—and I refuse to abandon them. Perhaps I’ll have one engraved on my tombstone. He died doing what he loved—dashing.
I encourage people to discriminate against me because I write like an educated African who works annotating AI training material.
Why not? I am a descendant of Africans. I am a mildly successful author by tech nerd standards. I was educated in the British Public School tradition, right down to taking Latin in high school and cheering on our Rugby* and Cricket teams.
If someone doesn't want to read my words or employ me because I must be AI, that's their problem. The truth is, they won't like what I have to say any more than they like the way I say it.
I have made my peace with this.
———
Speaking of Rugby, in 1973 another school's Rugby team played ours, and almost the entire school turned out to watch a celebrity on the other school's team.
His name was Andrew, and he is very much in the news today.
Funny thing is I started using them in the last 5 or 6 years myself in place of commas where I wanted to interject some extra info. Of course I'm lazy and don't bother typing the actual em dash, I just use a regular dash. Now I feel gross using them because I don't want people thinking I turned my brain off.
I have always used double-dashes instead of emdashes, and it annoys me when software "auto-corrects" them into emdashes. Moreso since emdashes became an AI tell.
I also see AIs use emdashes in places where parentheses, colons, or sentence breaks are simply more appropriate.
yeah, I am a trans lady who was kinda tempted to give this guy six bucks for this insanely overproduced version of a primitive video game, and now I am not gonna do that. <3
> I'm old enough to remember what it was like Before: whoever your people are, for good or for ill, you'll be able to find them.
it's still like this, you just have to look a little harder, and be more wary of nazi recruiters than you used to.
I always preferred Vitals... at some point after Blood Music, it must have occurred to him that if the cells could be programmed to be individually intelligent, then evolution might have already done that. The idea shows up again in Darwin's Radio.
Inkscape is not an option, nor is anything involving importing PDF/SVG, those have to expand a huge ton of stuff that's represented much more compactly in an .AI file. It's about as large a difference as that between an executable file and its source code.
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