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Flash Reference Guide

Aug 22, 2003

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If you’re a Web designer or developer, then you’ll likely be creating your Web sites in Adobe’s Dreamweaver and using Adobe’s Flash for your rich, interactive elements. Without a doubt, there is no better Web-based animation tool than Flash. You can create simple, flipbook-style animations with animated GIF images, but with Flash as a choice, do you really want to use GIFs?

Flash is being used today by hundreds of thousands of designers and can be viewed on an estimated 625,000,000 different, unique computers worldwide, or roughly 97 percent of all people surfing the Internet.

Unlike Java, ActiveX Controls, animated GIFs, or any other Web presentation tool that’s widely used, Flash is the only tool that’s a proven professional design tool coupled with an enterprise-wide application solution. In other words, you have it all with Flash.

What This Guide is All About

Welcome to the Flash Design Guide. The focus of the Flash Design Guide is to give you the knowledge to do the following:

Understand what Flash is all about and why you should get involved with it
Learn how to use the designer tools, such as the Flash Authoring tool
Gain insight into professional tips and tricks

The guide will give you the knowledge you need to be successful with your Flash projects.

Brief History of Flash

Before you jump into using the Flash tools, I want to take a little time to cover the history of Flash.

Believe it or not, Flash has been around since 1995. In Internet years, that makes Flash a granddaddy solution. The first release of Flash came in August 1995 in the guise of a product called FutureSplash. The product was keyed into Netscape’s new plug-in API technology and boasted a plug-in that was less than 150KB in size.

The technology was not a runaway hit due to the massive success of animated GIFs, which were supported by both Netscape and Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer. The FutureSplash Player did, however, catch the eye of MSN executives who used it to provide their non-Web portal with rich animation effects. Right around that time, Disney began playing around with the FutureSplash Player as well.

After Adobe passed on its chance to acquire the player, Macromedia purchased the technology and, in 1996, Flash 1.0 came out.

Since then, the Flash team has followed these mantras: keep the player small, keep the platform support broad, and cram as much as programmatically possible into the little Flash Player.

There have been eight major releases of the Flash Player, with Flash 8.5—major release #9—scheduled to come out in the summer of 2006. Flash 4, however, is the most significant Flash release to date as it introduced a little scripting language called ActionScript that developers quickly used to build interaction into their Flash projects.

ActionScript was later modified in Flash 5 to reflect the syntax model of JavaScript and has been consistently improved upon since then. Flash 8.5 boasts support for the broadest set of features to date.

Today, Flash is not simply an animation tool. It is a fully programmable environment with data-aware objects common to most development programs, such as VisualBasic Forms and Java solutions. In addition, Flash supports rich media such as image formats, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Mp3 audio, Flash video, and more.

Flash’s rich set of features and broad adoption caught the eye of Adobe and, during the summer of 2005, Adobe completed the acquisition of Macromedia to gain access to its Flash technology. Arguably, Adobe spent a lot more money in 2005 to gain access to a technology that it was offered in 1995. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.

Modern Day Flash

Today, it seems that Flash is almost everywhere you look. Advertisers quickly realized that Flash ad campaigns are more effective than static JPG or animated GIF banners and now Web sites, such as Movies.com, frequently run Flash ads that play video too.

Flash is also being used in large sections of Web sites to add rich interactivity. VW.com, for example, frequently uses Flash to help potential customers review its products. Flash is also finding its way into traditional businesses, such as insurance. One example is Insuremyjewlry.com, which uses a Flash movie to build insurance polices online.

These are just some of the thousands of examples of Flash movies in production today on literally millions of Web pages.

The Future of Flash

Flash is the most widely used technology in the world. No single product has the same penetration as Flash, including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which is used by 90 percent of all Internet users. Flash’s success is due to its small plug-in size (less than 1MB) and the broad creative solutions it offers designers. While it’s hard to design for HTML, or even CSS, it’s easy to design in Flash and Flash makes it easy to add all sorts of rich interactivity and media. This has resulted in a new type of designer/programmer—the interactive developer who can use both sides of the brain.

Today, more than 60 percent of all Internet traffic is accessed over high-speed Internet connections allowing for rich solutions to be developed. In addition, there are more and more ways in which users are connecting to the Internet, including devices such as game systems, cable boxes, media centers, cell phones, and wireless devices. The list goes on and at the center of all of these solutions is Flash.

Not that Flash is alone in the new and emerging markets. New solutions such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation directly compete in what has up until now been a market exclusive to Flash. But this only means competition, which is good for us.

What you can expect from Adobe over the next few years is not explicitly known. However, some good guesses would include increased support and functionality to the Flash Player and the development tools used to create Flash movies.

It has never been a better time to be an interactive developer.

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