He was humiliated, failing to sell a single copy. Though Gay had previously considered this route, he thought the animation market was too small: distribution was limited to videotape and CD-Rom, so the only organisations that created animations were big studios. But then he heard about the capabilities of this new thing called the internet. Success, which relied on users actually downloading an accompanying player, came almost immediately. Microsoft needed software capable of showing video on their website, MSN.
It chose Future Splash. Disney would later adopt the product to build animation for its own online site. In December , Macromedia bought FutureWave Software, raising its profile further, and distributed it as a free browser plugin.
It also changed the name, which it thought too unwieldy. FutureSplash Animator became Macromedia Flash 1. Flash, like most long-running and regularly updated software, evolved drastically over the course of its life.
Every Flash user is confronted by a canvas — a blank white page. Onto this page, a user can draw an image; for the sake of this demonstration, imagine a happy little cloud. Your cloud, like everything else on the canvas, is governed by its own timeline, split into frames.
Currently, your happy little cloud is stationary. Imagine now that you want it to float across the page. You must first choose where you want it to end up and how many frames you want it to take getting there. Now, if you press play, Flash algorithmically generates the movement in between these two points known as key frames and your cloud floats across the canvas. Bad Flash animations had a very particular lilting movement, due to over reliance on this calculation.
Later versions of Flash, particularly after the introduction of the scripting language ActionScript in Flash 5, added deeper interactivity, the building blocks of games. You could add a behaviour, for instance — perhaps so that a viewer of your cloud could evaporate it with the click of a mouse. That Flash filled in this process for the artist was revelatory. He recalls that a fellow animator creating a three minute pilot pitch produced enough paper to stack above his head.
This process took seven months. In Flash, a similar animation could take as little as three days. His unlucky friend discovered Flash right after dropping the cash.
Flash is inherently visual, as Gay intended. It fulfilled three functions the online world had pined for. The first was a general yearning to create something richer than you could with a GIF or with HTML: Flash provided a platform for short-form video on the internet. Username or e-mail:. Login Cancel. Author: Ivan M Ivan M is a graphics pro. Find out more at his site: imsky. Keep the great info coming. Ron: Thanks for the correction! Pxleyes Photography and photoshop contests We are a community of people with a passion for photography, graphics and art in general.
Follow us:. Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now.
From this point on, Flash lost its luster. YouTube began using an experimental version of its website using HTML5 in , and in switched to that open standard for all its videos. Because of these many security vulnerabilities, Adobe was required to issue updates to Flash Player often.
Many were duped by websites telling them that they needed Flash Player to view content: they would download what they thought were legitimate Flash Player installers, only to find that malware had infected their Macs. Flashback was a particularly serious Trojan Horse that Intego discovered in This prompted Apple to release a specific Flashback malware removal tool in Flash Player updater malware was increasingly common, and became the default way to distribute malware on the Mac.
Some of this malware was truly malicious, and some of it was scareware , designed to make Mac users think their computers were compromised, and pay to have them "fixed. In , because of security vulnerabilities in unpatched versions of the Flash Player plugin, Apple started blocking old versions of Flash Player in its Safari web browser , with the browser displaying a dialog prompting users to download an up-to-date version from the Adobe website.
Actionscript changed all that. By combining Actionscript with buttons, Flash developers could create more than just simple animations. They could create entire interactive websites. Using ActionScript, buttons, and a handful of hacks, designers began to create interactive experiences using Flash as a baseline.
Some used the technology to add a short intro or small widget. Others built entire sites from the ground up using only Flash, so the only HTML on the page was an embedded player. There were drawbacks, of course. And because everything had to be loaded upfront, Flash sites ended up quite a bit slower. So Flash ushered in this whole new generation of web design. That was quickly followed by an influx of Flash developers and animators that pushed content to the web.
In fact, an entire subculture grew around the software Newgrounds anyone? The web surged with games, animations, movies and entire experiences built with Flash. In many ways, Flash pushed the very boundaries of the web, and made possible what had previously been impossible.
Then, with the release of Flash version 6 known as Flash MX in March of , Marcomedia added full video support to the software. Video was still a bit difficult to get working on the web, especially if you wanted compatibility on different browsers and operating systems. But with Flash MX, developers could embed their videos inside of a Flash animation and just like that have a cross-platform, reliable video player. And unlike some of its competitors, Flash removed a lot of cruft and chrome from its video embeds, opting instead to make things as customizable as possible.
This was in , right around the time when three software engineers walked away from Paypal, deciding instead to create a startup of their own. They whiteboarded some ideas, bought a domain name and began imagining a new product for the web.
A simple as dirt video uploading and streaming service. And of course they used Flash. In fact, Flash was a sort of serendipitous signpost for YouTube. Karim happened to mention the site he was working on to Rabois, who immediately asked if their video player used Flash.
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