Introduction

In 1997, Macromedia acquired the small company that developed FutureSplash as a way to complement Director, its flagship product. Director, which has been around longer than the Web, is a highly scriptable program built to create interactive presentations and games.

Chances are your favorite CD-ROM game was created with it. Toward the end of 1995, when Netscape Navigator 2 was the latest, greatest browser, Macromedia introduced Shockwave as a way to port Director movies to the Web.

Users downloaded and installed a free plug-in, and the movies played right there in the browser. That was — and is — pretty great. But since Director didn't start with the Web in mind, most Director movies tend to be big bandwidth hogs, and they do much, much more than what's necessary for the Web. On the other hand, there has been a growing need to create an alternative to standard GIFs and JPEGs, which lack versatility and can result in big files.

By the end of the 3rd quarter of 1998, less than 40% of all surfers were able to view Flash movies right away. A year later the percentage was 90% - and today Flash is a state-of-the-art method for vector graphics on the web.

And The Rest is History...

History of Flash

1984 - The firm MacroMind is found in Chicago. Merging of MacroMind and Authorware to Macromedia

1995 - Macromedia takes over Altsys (inventor of FreeHand) FutureWave develops simple vector-based illustration program: SmartSketch FutureWave presents the plugin Future-Splash-Player for SmartSketch

1996 - The animation program Cel-Animator is created by FutureWave In July renamed into FutureSplash-Animator Macromedia takes FutureWave over FutureSplash-Animator and Future-Splash-Player from now on known as Flash and Shockwave Flash

1997 - Flash 1 and shortly afterwards Flash 2 were published.

1998 - Java Player produced for Shockwave Flash-movies in the Flash 2 Flash 3 is published.

1999 - The next new version Flash 4 is available

2000 - Latest version of Flash - Flash 5

Characteristics and Advantages of using Flash:

HTML is ideal for creating static websites where text and images are placed at fixed positions. But it doesn't really support dynamic sites, where text, images, and animations are moving around on the screen. Traditionally, these effects were achieved with animated GIF images or java applets.

Before we going to explore the Flash, we will compare Flash to both animated GIFs and java applets.

An animated GIF is actually many images saved in one. When the animated GIF is loaded onto a webpage, the browser simply loops the images. This means, if you make an animation of a clown that moves his hand up and down in 25 small movements, then the clown is saved 25 times. The animated version of the clown becomes 25 times bigger than a regular clown image. Therefore, even small animations take forever to load.

While animated GIFs can be used for animations, they do not support interactivity. They simply loop images in a predefined order and that's it. In Flash, you can control the animations. For example, you can make the animation stop and wait for the user to click a button. And when the animation starts again it can be dependant on which button was clicked.

So compared to animated GIFs, the advantages of Flash are that: Flash movies load much faster. Flash movies allow interactivity.

Flash movies are in many ways similar to java applets. Small programs that can be embedded into your HTML pages. But unlike java applets, it is fairly easy to create animations in Flash without programming skills. Flash movies are more stable in web browsers than java applets.