I’m an old hand at Flash and was gutted when they finally deprecated it. Since then I’ve been on the hunt for the holy grail, a decent HTML5 alternative for Windows. That’s why I was delighted to come across Saola Animate which I’m running a 30 day trial of now.
I love that you can put symbols inside symbols, an important feature in Flash. I’d love to see more of the Flash basics included, however, without having to use external libraries. Maybe Saola can incorporate a popular one and build its functions into the code free interface. Such as being able to use mouse position to interact with symbols, incorporating a constant timer that mimics ‘frames’ for animating symbols interactively, sliders with constraints, global and local coordinates (e.g. main stage and within symbols), movable registration point within symbols (e.g. the point around which a symbol rotates or scales can be set by the user), I could go on.
I’m very impressed with what I’ve seen of Saola so far, and I hope that more of the kinds of built-in features that were available in Flash CS6 using AS2 or AS3 can be incorporated as time goes on.