Flash
(1) See also flash memory and flash button.
(2) A multimedia authoring and playback system from Adobe. Launched in 1996 by Macromedia, which was acquired by Adobe in 2005, the Flash format is used for most of the animated ads and video clips on today's Web sites. Created in authoring applications, such as Flash MX, Flash Basic and Flash Professional, Flash "movies" are played by the Flash Player within the Web browser or from a stand-alone application that accesses the Player. Flash Player is a free client application for popular browsers.
Animated Graphics, Sound and Video
Animation is choreographed using one or more sequential timelines in which actions and interactions are defined. Multimedia elements from other applications are imported into the Flash application, which itself has basic drawing and painting tools. Although bitmapped images can be used, Flash animations became very popular on the Web because they support vector graphics. Vector images are very space efficient compared to a sequence of bitmapped frames, and they scale with accurate detail no matter how much the window is resized by the user.
The Flash format also supports sound and video, providing a full multimedia container for animation and movie sequences. Flash became extremely popular as a video format because it lets authors easily add interactive controls (see Flash video). See vector graphics.
Flash Applications
Flash is also used to create rich client applications. As of Version 5, Flash became fully programmable, enabling Flash to be used to create an interactive application that accepts input from the user. ActionScript and MXML are languages used to write Flash programs, and Flex is a Flash application development system (see Flex).
The Small Web Format (SWF)
The Flash container file that holds all the multimedia elements uses the .FLA extension, and the .SWF extension is used for the Flash file that is generated from the .FLA and played back.
Originally, SWF meant "ShockWave Flash," which confused people because the Shockwave name came from a different authoring package that actually used the .DCR extension for playback files (see Shockwave). As a result, SWF was renamed "Small Web Format."
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| Flash Authoring |
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| Objects in a Flash animation are placed in separate timelines (top) so that they move together in the required sequence. |
flash1. Chemistry a volatile mixture of inorganic salts used to produce a glaze on bricks or tiles
2. a. a sudden rush of water down a river or watercourse
b. a device, such as a sluice, for producing such a rush
4. Engineering a ridge of thin metal or plastic formed on a moulded object by the extrusion of excess material between dies