Well, good news and bad news time: the good news is that I have stuck with the versions of Flash for animation that I could actually BUY without an annual rental for the software, keeping me at the "CS5" iteration (the one just before it launched the near-identical rental-only version called "Animate").
The FIRST bad news was that, amid my tech crashes of overworked hard drives and shuffling software on and off machines, even with "unregistering," I am discovering that using the CS3 version as a backup no longer even permits *registering* any more.
Ok... and today the SECOND bad news - Adobe has decided all animation should be "generational AI," so it's going to stop licensing any of the rental versions of Flash, now "Animate," effective March 1, 2026. And it also means they'll stop "support" in 2027. Adobe is notorious for its apathetic definition of "support," so in reality it means that if you're renting your software in their cloud, the cloud will go pfft! in 2027 for the software.
And it also means that should I ever move my creaky CS5 version of Flash to a newer computer, even with unregistering it, it won't be allowed to run after 2027.
Now before I get a deluge of options, understand that I use my Flash/Animate to create the sequential images, which I then slide into a video creator, frame by frame, to build a film. The only attraction Flash has had that kept me with it this long was the ability to make an "animated symbol," so I could build a collection of 12-24 frame "loops" that would keep animating while I worked on the rest of the scenes. I haven't found a software that mimics that capability at this time.
I feel that those who are using Animate now, in commercial as well as educational venues, are REALLY going to be shafted by this decision by Adobe. I will be backing up all my flash-ish generated FLA files from my projects over the past dozen years into jpgs, pngs, and maybe even gifs (most of them have been in those formats already) and will be diving into Blender with greater enthusiasm, with Krita and OpenToonz as other options.
I am also looking at Kinora and Mutoscope options...or even sequential stone carvings (Edmore has a history of that already!).
Here's one of a bajillion comments online about this Adobe decision: https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/adobe-kills-animate-in-major-ai-pivot-leaving-creators-stranded
