Warning: core memory. Let us dive into my private little world:

Core Memory

When I came back from the Clairs-Soleil day camp in Besançon as a tiny kid, my father would buy me my ritual can of Orangina and we would go to his company’s offices.

There, he would sit me in front of his work Macintosh, and I would start drawing vector Indians in Adobe Illustrator 88, which at the time fit on a floppy disk.

Adobe Illustrator 88

Later, we got an Apple computer for the house, and when I was not playing with my figurines and Lego, I explored every corner of Mac OS.

I grew up with that machine and spent my time in the basement studio of my house, discovering, among other things, the CD-ROMs that came with computer magazines such as “SVM Mac”.

Bastien in front of his Macintosh

I used Macromedia Director, the ancestor of Flash, to create interactive animations and games, like my famous “Du Sang et des Chats” back in middle school.

I discovered the wonderful world of Photoshop, which my father brought home from work, and from a very young age I learned to master its features and keyboard shortcuts.

Later still, I got my own PC and started downloading software illegally, especially Adobe products.

With friends, I made games with Macromedia Flash, which Adobe acquired in 2005. I remember, for example, games like “Exoos le Dauphin” and “Yoyo Story”.

After high school, in 2004/2005, I went up to Paris to create the website Burma, the Story of Survival with Flash and Photoshop.

I created the websites of the associations MosOcoM and TEJE using Flash.

I deepened my knowledge of ActionScript, Flash’s programming language, first in version 2 and then in version 3, especially thanks to a book I nicknamed my AS3 Bible.

Pratique d’ActionScript 3 by Thibault Imbert

I carried out several projects with Flash and ActionScript. In particular, I created animations for ad banners and New Year’s cards, using fake 3D and a particle engine.

The most ambitious project was the redesign of Mercedes-Benz’s MBCOM software from AS2 to object-oriented AS3.

Adobe officially discontinued Flash Player on December 31, 2020.

From that date onward, the software was no longer maintained, no longer received security updates, and was no longer distributed by Adobe.

That was a hard blow for me, and even today I still suffer from the fact that there is no longer anything to read my old Shockwave (SWF) animations.

Flash was the best software.

With my graphics tablet, I made several illustrations in Photoshop for associations and personal projects.

I stopped pirating software, and I must say that I have paid back my debt pretty well in recent years by paying for a Creative Cloud subscription for two years without really using it.

Rant.

To me, Adobe’s policy regarding access to its products today is a disgrace.

Photoshop and Illustrator should be declared part of humanity’s heritage and made available to everyone for a modest, mostly symbolic amount.

Adobe’s business model, based on gatekeeping, is obsolete and really reminds me of the way Microsoft still has not made Windows open source, even though almost all of humanity depends on that technology.

I hope either that they repent or that competition makes them obsolete.

End of rant.

Recently, I watched the keynote where Adobe presented its Turntable technology for Illustrator, which lets artificial intelligence rotate an object in space while preserving its vector properties.

The AI predicts the hidden side of the object in an accurate and realistic way.

That really impressed me.

Turntable

Even so, I am not giving up on dedicating part of my revenue to purchasing Creative Cloud again, so I can follow the trainings I have in mind and carry out SANDBAVA agency projects properly.

I have not talked about InDesign, After Effects, or Premiere Pro, but they are also products I tried in my youth and would like to learn properly today.

I hope you enjoyed this story and understood that I am an old-timer.