MiniFlash: a love letter to the timeline

Main point: MiniFlash is my browser-based tribute to the Flash animation editor, inside Unplanned OS. It's not a clone, but it's a real, responsive editor built in a handful of sessions.

Why

In the early 2000s, a generation of designers (myself included) learned to animate in Macromedia, later Adobe Flash. After Steve Jobs's Thoughts on Flash in 2010, it died, and the plugin deserved to. I miss the editor, though. The timeline (layers, keyframes, tweening, scrubbing) is still one of the best ways to think about motion.

What it does

• Timeline with layers, frames, keyframes and motion tweens
• Reusable symbols and a library
• Onion skinning
• Hand and zoom tools, swatches, a resizable timeline
• SVG import, JSON save and load, WebM video export
• Undo, redo and the familiar shortcuts

What it doesn't

No pen tool, no ActionScript, no SWF or FLA import, no nested symbol editing and no shape tweens. It's an MVP, with the rest as a roadmap rather than a promise.

How it was built

With the agent, in phases: timeline and tween engine, then authoring touches, then onion skin, tools and SVG import. No new dependencies needed.

Responsive

Three panels on desktop, sheets on tablet, a compact toolbar and pinch to zoom on phone. The same document plays the same everywhere.

Open MiniFlash and press Space to watch the demo.