Adobe Flash Professional

Adobe Flash Professional was a tool for creating flash animations that could be played from from websites such as YouTube. It also featured a scripting language that allowed interactivity and gained widespread use in the early 2000s. However, it was also criticized for its security issues.

History
Flash Professional was previously developed by Macromedia, which Adobe had acquired in December 2005. Some users felt that the Macromedia versions of the application were simpler and easier to use.

Discontinuation
In April 2010, Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrote an open critique of the Flash platform to justify his refusal to support the technology on Apple's successful iOS line, which included the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. An Apple engineer later stated that Jobs was offended that Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen would not take his phone calls for what he perceived to be "mere engineering problems". Developers of third-party web browsers began to blacklist the Flash plugin by default due to security issues. In July 2017, Adobe announced that it would phase out support for Flash by the end of 2020.

Rebranding
In February 2016, the professional authoring application was re-branded as Adobe Animate with support for web-based standards such as HTML5.