Adobe Flash

This article is currently being developed as part of an Eduzendium student project. One of the goals of the course is to provide students with insider experience in collaborative educational projects, and so you are warmly invited to join in here, or to leave comments on the discussion page. However, please refrain from removing this notice. Besides, many other Eduzendium articles welcome your collaboration!

Adobe Flash, a multimedia authoring software developed by Adobe Systems (formerly by Macromedia), is used to create vector graphics-based animation programs, rich content, user interfaces and web applications, and combine videos with web pages.

Adobe Flash is written in C++, and contains ActionScript (a scripting language) for building almost all the interactivity (buttons, text entry fields, drop down menus) in its applications. In order to view standalone Adobe Flash (SWF) multimedia files and interact with Flash content, users need to download and install Adobe Flash Player, which is a multiple-platform client runtime software application.

History

Flash program was built by Jonathan Gay, who began his professional Programming life as a Macintosh software engineer early in high school. After years of game design, he focused on building graphics editors and started FutureWave Software company with Charlie Jackson in 1993. In order to make drawing on the computer easier than drawing on paper, they built software called SmartSketch.

As a competitor of Illustrator and FreeHand, SmartSketch didn't gain success until 1995, it was turned into an animation product FutureSplash Animator for people sending graphics and animation over Internet. The ancestor of Flash Player was also born at that time.

In August of 1996, FutureSplash got big support from Microsoft and Disney Online. Microsoft used FutureSplash on MSN to create the most TV-like experience on the Internet. And Disney Online adopted FutureSplash to build animation and the user interface for the Disney Daily Blast.

In December 1996, FutureWave Software was sold to Macromedia, and FutureSplash Animator became Macromedia Flash 1.0. Since then, Flash becomes synonymous with animation on the Internet.

Authoring tool released timeline

Product Name	Released Year
FutureSplash Animator	1996
Macromedia Flash 1	1996
Macromedia Flash 2	1997
Macromedia Flash 3	1998
Macromedia Flash 4	1999
Macromedia Flash 5	2000
Macromedia Flash MX (version 6)	2002
Macromedia Flash MX 2004 (version 7)	2003
Macromedia Flash Basic 8	2005
Macromedia Flash Professional 8	2005
Adobe Flash CS3 Professional	2007

Player released timeline

Product Name	Released Year
Macromedia Flash 2	1997
Macromedia Flash 3	1998
Macromedia Flash 4	1999
Macromedia Flash 5	2001
Macromedia Flash MX	2002
Macromedia Flash MX 2004	2003
Macromedia Flash 8	2005
Adobe Flash 9 for Windows and Macintosh	2006
Adobe Flash 9 for Linux	2007
Adobe Flash CS3	2007
Adobe Flash Player 10	2008

Technology

Standard

Flash hasn't complied to W3C standard perfectly, alough there is a way to use <object> tag to insert a flash file into web page, the common usage of <embed> is a illegal tag, which is a private tag of Netspace, but not recognized by W3C.

In the Draft Recommendation of the HTML 5, the W3C has a section named "Relationship to XUL, Flash, Silverlight, and other proprietary UI languages", which says, "This specification is independent of the various proprietary UI languages that various vendors provide. As an open, vender-neutral language, HTML provides for a solution to the same problems without the risk of vendor lock-in."

Examples

How to make an animation using Flash?

An animation is constituted by a series of frames. Each frame represents a single static motion. When they are shown in sequence, it looks like the object on the picture is moving. Here is a simple example of making an animation:

First, new a flat file and make two layers as follows:

(CC) Image: Ganggang Hu
Made by Ganggang Hu, 2008

(CC) Image: Ganggang Hu
Made by Ganggang Hu, 2008

Second, set the 10th frame as the keyframe for the first layer and the 20th frame as the keyframe for the second layer.

Finally, export, save as a swf file and display the animation:

(CC) Image: Ganggang Hu
Made by Ganggang Hu, 2008

How to put Flash into a web page?

For the compatibility among different kinds of browser, the format of embedding Flash in HTML is as follows:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/hE1K0ZeTtAw&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/hE1K0ZeTtAw&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Or write as follows to comply with W3C standard:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/hE1K0ZeTtAw&hl=en&fs=1" width="400" height="300"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/hE1K0ZeTtAw&hl=en&fs=1" /> </object>