Remember before any peer to peer software or bit torrents existed, people would just connect to random FTP servers and blindly download “stuff”.
Music, random executables, dumb little indi “apps” with no credits what so ever.
I member
I remember it just like it was yesterday. Don’t tell anyone, but I still use FTP/SFTP for file management of the files here…via Dreamweaver 
Pretty sure most people are still doing that. 
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I do too, for that purpose i assumed it was still the main way?
Not any more. About a year ago, I switched over to using Sketch exclusively. I do miss Flash/Animate’s line drawing tool that allowed me to draw a squiggly line and then smooth it out 
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Does sketch output optimized SVG? e.g.
<svg id="milestone" class='logo' version="1.1" viewBox="0 0 16.428711 4.4595525" preserveAspectRatio="xMidYMin slice" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
<g style="fill:#ffffff;stroke-width:.021001">
<path d="m0 2.2355c0-.0173 2.1738-2.205 2.1738-2.205l2.2049 2.2052-2.2052 2.2051s-2.1735-2.188-2.1735-2.2053z" style="fill:#009ada"/>
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</g>
</svg>So was the switch due to still using an older version that could no longer keep up on newer OS’s, or it just being finally time to say goodbye and move on? Overall was it a pretty “smooth” transition aside from that feature ? 
The biggest reason was that the exporting capabilities in Animate became buggy. I export all of my graphics as 2x and 3x PNG images, and there were enough bugs where the export would always be 1x despite what the previewer said. That was frustrating, so that pushed me over to Sketch. As I got used to Sketch, it has a lot of nice features that are better optimized for my use-cases around creating vector-based graphics.
Having a single Sketch document with multiple “pages” that I can use for managing all of my visuals as opposed to having a FLA file for each diagram is quite the time saver 
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I vaguely remember having png export bugs as well, but the main problem i faced with png exporting in animate (or the last version with the flash name), they introduced sprite sheet exporting as they appeared to be going along with AIR for mobile.
The sheets it generated used full squares i believe, and far more empty space with each frame. Besides losing a ton of space per sheet, the performance of rendering that extra transparency was absolutely huge on mobile (which at that time devices were very performance restricted). Add to that the loss of space means you may need an extra sheet causing more draw calls.
Simply generating sprite sheets with the little program texture packer by one single guy living out of a dumpster (ok i made that part up) far out performed flashes sprite sheets on ios/android.
Then they just kinda didn’t fix it…
It was a pretty core need in my view. Everyone in the AIR community, and i mean everyone, me, and like 3 other humans on planet earth still using air were outraged. That might have been the last actually flashing i did, but continued using AIR with flash develop IDE for a while after.
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Really agree, there is a big number of people.
It was so normal back in the day to click on a FTP link and have Windows Explorer launch with all of the FTP folders and files for us to drag/drop/download. It was always a “special view” since the context menu contained only 3 or 4 items and none of the special ones that polluted the menu like those of WinZip etc.
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