In 2002, I opened Macromedia Flash for the first time. Back then, I was already making simple cartoons in Paint and Movie Maker, but one day my brother told me: “That’s not serious. If you want to get good at this, use Flash.” Thanks, Vlad.

For me, Flash became a door into the world of design and software development. I started with cartoons, recorded voiceovers with the cheapest microphone I could find, and was completely fascinated by the whole thing. Flash did not come easily to me, but I could spend hours, sometimes entire days, inside it: drawing things, animating them, breaking them, rebuilding them, and trying again. Sometimes the result was complete nonsense, but the simple fact that I could make something on a screen move and react to me felt almost like magic.

Later, I went to university to study software development, finally started to understand ActionScript, and began experimenting with more than just cartoons. I made Matrix-style intros, website headers, websites that pulled data from XML, interfaces, buttons, menus, and all kinds of strange little experiments. I think that is why I fell in love with Flash. It could do a lot, but still felt surprisingly simple: you could draw, animate, and code in one place and see the result almost immediately.

By the end of university, I was making simple arcade games and platformers in Flash. Those projects were also how I earned my first money. Even the first bicycle I bought entirely with my own money existed, in some way, because of Flash.

That is probably why it was so frustrating for me to watch what happened to it later. After Adobe acquired it, the software gradually became heavier and more complicated, and eventually Flash disappeared altogether. I understand the technical reasons: memory leaks, security issues, performance, browser plugins, all of it. But what I still miss is not really the technology itself. I miss the feeling that disappeared with it. Flash was a very simple door into making something of your own.

And now, with AI and vibe coding making it possible for one person to build things that used to feel far too big or complicated, I eventually had a thought: why not try to make Flash again? Not a new Flash, and not a modern version of it. That Flash.

That is how Flosh happened. It runs on HTML5. It has a timeline, symbols, drawing tools, its own player, and even a small, simplified version of ActionScript. In spirit and structure, I tried to keep it as close as possible to Macromedia Flash MX — not as a perfect replica, and not as an attempt to bring the past back, but as a small tribute to the developers, artists, and the huge community that once grew around Flash.

When I open Flosh, I feel something close to the same excitement I felt when I spent my childhood inside Flash. The internet has become much more complicated, and the tools have become much more powerful, but sometimes I still just want to draw a circle, press F6, and make it move.

Maybe that is why Flosh exists. If it brings back even a little bit of that feeling — when there are only a few clicks between an idea and something alive on the screen — then it was worth making.

Have fun. Make weird stuff.

— Andrey Anashkin · anashk.in · iam@anashk.in