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An Animated Look at Flash

Most of the software innovations that have come along since the internet boom during the mid-nineties have been small ones or programs that have slightly improved upon another existing piece of software. It is rare that a program is developed and it totally revolutionizes its genre and community. Macromedia’s Flash is the software that did just that. Macromedia, earlier known as Future Wave, faced stiff competition in the early years of computer illustration and needed to find a market that had been untapped. The market they found, with a little help from its customers, was computer animation.

Flash was originally the brain child of Jonathan Gay, the current Vice President of Flash and Generator at Macromedia. After creating his own company called “Future Wave”, in the early nineties Jonathan was working with Robert Tatsumi attempting to develop illustration software that would allow the user to draw on the screen using a special pen for a company called GO. Unfortunately the program was too resource heavy and expensive for the current investor, AT&T, to keep funding the project and the plug was pulled. In order to get some compensation for their work, the two totally revamped the software so that it would run on PC’s and Macintosh’s and released “Smart Sketch”, a simple illustration tool, into the market.

The creation of Smart Sketch is so significant because during the summer of 1995, Future Wave started receiving customer suggestions saying that they should turn Smart Sketch into some kind of animation tool. Since they were fighting an uphill battle against already established named like FreeHand and Illustrator, they took the idea into consideration. In 1996, the existence of a World Wide Web was creating buzz all over the tech world. Future Wave immediately saw a market for its animation software, and soon there after developed what would be known as “Future Splash Animator”.

Future Wave’s big break came when they were asked to do design work for Disney’s website, shortly thereafter they were sought after by Microsoft to work on a project they had going called “MSN”. The goal was to create an internet experience for the user that was as close to television as possible. That type of exposure was not going to keep Future Wave unnoticed for long. Macromedia approached Future Wave in the fall of 1996 about taking Future Wave under its wing and Future Wave agreed. From that point on Future Splash Animator became Macromedia Flash and content on the web, as we know it, would never be the same.

After eight years of development with new programming languages being released frequently one would think that Flash runs on a cutting edge engine with nothing less then the most efficient methods of programming. Apparently after one company merger and five revisions Flash is still running on the majority of the code that was written for Smart Sketch when it was being built to run on pen computers.

Although Flash may use simple programming techniques and languages to create the software itself, the graphics system it uses is far from it. Flash uses a vector graphics system which uses simple shapes like lines, points, curves, and polygons to display images on the screen as opposed to pixilated images. This technology allows the user to create very detailed and lengthy animations while keeping file sizes down and in return translates to less bandwidth use once the animation is online. This is a huge improvement from the original design that Future Wave created. When Future Wave proposed Splash Animator’s technology to representatives at Adobe and other companies, it was the speed that was the major reason why they had to pass.

Flash’s creation was enough to “WOW” the world but once the word was out other companies wanted to duplicate its success. Flash has had to keep reinventing itself with new innovations with each release in order to keep the competition a step behind.

One of these innovations was the integration of a programming language known as ActionScript that originally allowed users to be able to fill in text areas with commands that would manipulate certain aspects of a Flash document. ActionScript and JavaScript are similar for the fact that they are both based on the same object-oriented principle but JavaScript deals with handling windows, forms, etc. ActionScript focuses on movie clips, sounds, and all kinds of media. For example, ActionScript can tell the webpage to wait for the audio track to fully load before actually playing the animation so that they are in sync with each other. With the recent release of Flash MX Pro, ActionScript 2.0 has become a full fledged object-oriented language with the capacity to declare classes, use inheritance, and interfaces. This gives the developer the ability to create extensive user interfaces, execute more complex functions, and gives Flash a tag of being an elite development tool.

Obviously Flash is not perfect and with all software in a competitive market comes the pros and cons. One of Flash’s strengths from the beginning is its easy to use interface and the small learning curve it has. A person with no experience in computer animation can sit down, start tinkering with Flash and in a short amount of time create a simple animated movie. The grumble that the web community has had with Flash making designing animated web content became so easy is that it leads to developers creating web sites entirely from Flash which could have certain areas achieve the same effect using HTML and a few JPEGs, which would save on bandwidth usages and loading speed for visitors. “Pure Flash” websites have become quite popular and for the most part causes web pages to be just flat out ugly and unusable but pleases the developer because they are using the latest technology.

Another disadvantage that stems from what was just discussed is that Flash content is quite burdensome to update in comparison to HTML. Web Designers will put out a sleek looking webpage with a Flash navigational section or it will be decked out entirely in Flash in order to attract traffic and then rarely update it because you cannot just “View Source”, edit, and upload Flash. Detailing the entire process of editing a Flash entity of a website is a fairly in depth task and for the sake of this paper I will not go into specifics, for those who have used Flash in the past (myself included) know what would be required to be done.

In the case of the software business, with the bad comes the good, and one of the good elements of Flash is its versatility and ability to work with all kinds of media. The earlier releases of Flash had the ability to play sounds to add life to animations, then it was upgraded and the option of playing streaming audio was added. With the release of Flash MX in 2002 a codec for streaming video came to the table which totally blew the previous video capacity of Flash out of the water. Flash 2004 MX Pro (the most current revision) has the power to embed images, sound, video, and HTML which makes it an all-in-one multimedia stage.

As far as functioning within a web environment goes, Flash is pretty solid, this is expected because it was built to display its content online. Having Flash content appear on a web page requires you to insert a simple tag into the HTML that has the location of the particular file on your server, to put it in perspective it is a lot like displaying a Java applet.

Macromedia did take into account that Flash animations can become very resource heavy and that some people do not upgrade as often as they should. Therefore they designed a way for the user to set the quality of the animation to low, medium, or high. This option designates the amount of anti-aliasing that is performed to the animation being played. Anti-aliasing is a process that the video card handles in order to smooth rough edges.

Macromedia is still yet to create some kind of way for the end user to have more control over the content that they are watching. As of right now the user can only control whether the animation loops, plays, rewinds, fast forwards, pauses, and zooms. The main problem is with the rewind and fast forward options, which never seem to work correctly and usually result in the need to restart the entire scene over again.

In addition, one of the web community’s biggest problems with Flash animations is that you cannot control things like font size, scrolling, playing speed, etc. These kinds of limitations can be dealt with by the developer, who could put the effort into creating an ActionScript function to control all of the above events, but they should already be available and integrated into the settings.

As of right now no browsers come “Flash ready”, whenever your browser wants to display a Flash file and it has not viewed one before, you are required to go to the Macromedia website and download the appropriate plug-in. For most developers this would be a major obstacle in having your technology becoming successful and widely used. This is just not the case when you talk about Flash.

According to Macromedia ninety-five percent of all internet users have some form of they’re Flash plug-in installed on their computer which projects Flash to be the most widely used piece of software on the internet, ahead of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and Real Player. This type of success is possible because Flash’s plug-in installation is easy for any user to understand and it can be installed on pretty much any major operating system. Flash has the ability to run on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Pocket PC, and Unix systems.

Over the course of this paper all aspects of Macromedia’s Flash have been discussed. Addressing its functionality, advantages, disadvantages, what makes it tick, why it is so successful, and even how it came to be. Most people would say it was just luck that Future Wave was the first to create something that broke through in the two-dimensional animation market. Or you could say it is because Flash constantly delivers tools that are essential to a web designer’s arsenal in the ever growing world of technology. Flash makes a developer’s job one thousand times easier and gives people the power to put together an online multimedia experience that is often imitated but never duplicated.

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