Flash
Overview
What is Flash?
Most people who have done a fair amount of Web surfing have no doubt heard of Macromedia's Flash technology. It's almost impossible to go anywhere on the Web without seeing a Flash movie of some sort: simple banner advertisements; entire interactive Web interfaces; complex games; even Flash applications that integrate with an online database.
So even though most people have seen or at least heard of Flash, many may not be familiar with the program that creates all this wonderful stuff, which is what this course is all about.
History of Flash
Flash got its start in the mid-1990's as an animation program called FutureSplash. FutureSplash was created in order to allow Web developers to create vector based graphics animations that could be shown in a Web browser. Macromedia soon bought FutureSplash, and it became Macromedia Flash 1.0.
The early versions of Flash contained many of the same animation and drawing tools that current versions posses, but they were mostly limited to simple animations with very little interactivity. By the time Flash 2.0 came about, some interactivity was introduced Flash, in the form of something called "Actions". These early actions could not be scripted directly into the program, they were added to the Flash movie with panels and interfaces, with the user never actually seeing the script itself. These early actions did things such as making the movie go to a certain frame, stopping, starting, and even a get URL action that could load a new page into the Browser window.
This method of adding interactivity with the use of panels continued on through Flash versions 3 and 4. Many other actions were added to these versions, giving more and more interactivity, however the user still could not directly write script into the program. (Even though Flash 4 started to show the script in the script pane, you still could not edit it directly.)
ActionScript
Flash 5 changed everything. The Flash user now had the option of typing in script directly into a script editor (while still allowing users to add Actions the old way), giving much more power to what was at one time a simple animation program for the Web. By this time, Flash actions had become a language called ActionScript. Later versions of Flash expanded on the ActionScript language, and gave it greater abilities with newer, more powerful actions.
Flash Today
The latest version of Flash, Flash MX 2004 is still similar in many ways to the original FutureSplash program, in terms of drawing and animation, but of course many other features have been added to Flash to make it one of the most popular multimedia applications anywhere.
Flash Player Versions
What people can sometimes find a bit confusing, is that while Macromedia has done away with numbered versions for the latest 2 releases of Flash, the Flash Player still uses numbered versions. So while Flash 5 made could make movies that could run in the Flash 5 player, Flash MX made movies that could run in the Flash 6 player. Flash MX 2004 creates content for the Flash 7 player.
Note that each version of Flash can create content for earlier Flash Player versions as well.
2 Different Versions
With the latest release of Flash, Macromedia has taken a slightly different approach. They have split Flash into 2 similar, but separate programs: Flash MX 2004, and Flash MX 2004 Professional. Flash MX 2004 is geared toward standard Flash developers, but Flash MX 2004 Professional is geared towards high-end Flash developers.
Flash MX 2004 professional contains most of the same features as the non-professional version, but it has some extras that make it worth its slightly more expensive price tag. One of the biggest draws of Flash MX 2004 Professional is its video capabilities. Professional allows the Flash developer to make use of Flash's own Video format, FLV. Flash video content can now stream directly into another Flash movie as a separate file.
Which Version?
Whether you choose Flash MX 2004, or Flash MX 2004 Professional should depend on what you intend on using Flash for. If you are planning to do a lot of video work with Flash for the Web, or are planning to integrate Flash with online databases, you should probably choose Flash MX 2004 Professional. However, if you won't be doing these things, you should find that the regular version of Flash should suit your needs more than adequately. Flash MX and Flash MX 2004 do have some video and database integration capabilities as well, but they aren't as powerful as the capabilities in Flash MX 2004 Professional.
It should be noted that this is an introductory Flash course, and therefore many of the more advanced Flash techniques (including some of the ones mentioned above) are not covered in this course. While it is actually very easy to learn and use, Flash can also be quite complicated. The purpose of this course is to get you acquainted with the basics of Flash, so you can move on to more difficult things like ActionScript programming later on if you wish.
Flash - TOC - Introduction - Books -
Overview - Links - Questions - Quiz -
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