SAN JOSE, CA — Time flies when you’re surfing the Web and although it may seem like only yesterday, it was a decade ago tomorrow that the program once called FutureSplash, then Macromedia Flash, and ultimately just Flash, introduced itself to the world of computer animation and multimedia authoring.Initially created to provide content for the Adobe Engagement Platform for web applications, games, and videos, the increasingly popular program is an official Adobe property now that the company has purchased Macromedia and its various applications. Although initially only supported by Netscape, Flash is now supported by most of the popular web browsers and provides support for bidirectional streaming audio and video, ActionScript, and both vector and raster graphics.
During its 10 years of development, it has seen many competitors drop by the wayside and has become one of the most popular ways of adding interactivity and animation to web pages, including many modern web advertisements. Its Flash Video Player is the choice of many high profile sites, including YouTube.com.
Although delighted by its progress, Adobe think tankers hope to see it become more of a general purpose application development platform in the near future, focusing especially on video delivery, mobile device applications, and Web-based applications that run even when the browser is closed.
“Today the shift is from animations to applications,” chief software architect and senior vice president of Adobe’s platform business unit, Kevin Lynch, explains. According to Lynch, “The community around Flash has been pushing” Adobe to enable Web applications and so the company has been moving in that direction, counting on webmasters to build sites that favor Flash and create a favorable “ecosystem” for further development and partnership.
In order to encourage such a thing, Adobe has upgraded the Flash Player to run scripts more quickly and introduced Flex, a Flash development environment aimed at beefing up the tools available to developers.
The future of the program is optimistic in spite of increasing competition from Microsoft and other challengers — and its past provides an interesting look into the development of the internet. Because of this, Adobe has launched a microsite within the overall company site featuring a 10 year retrospective of Flash’s evolution. Among its offerings, the site includes interviews with the program’s developers.
