The Power of Macromedia Flash
A bird’s eye view of Flash & its capabilities

By: M Tabraiz Feham
http://www.tabraizfeham.blogspot.com

As the Internet continues to grow with hundreds of thousands of pages being published everyday; the battle for drawing visitors to web pages and conveying them the message is getting harder and tougher. People like to visit the page that is dynamic, enticing, comprehensive, and yet simple in its contents. In this arena the tools & technologies such as Shockwave & Flash are making life easier for cyber stakeholders.

Whether it is a question of high quality vector animation over the web or a light GIF animation, whether it is a cartoon film or home movie, whether it is a company's corporate multimedia presentation or an advertisement banner, whether it is a dynamic web application or an XML based Web-Service, whether it is a cell phone's graphical interface or an online game, whether it is editing of sound or streaming of video over the web, whether it is highly animated 3D website or a very light yet eye catching web portal; The answer is Flash.

Since the booming of Flash version 4, Macromedia Flash has evolved itself as one of the industry's leading solution provider, While offering powerful tools for web designers & animators, Flash's Object Oriented action scripting language backs the developers to program with freedom & ease.

But despite all these great features, Flash still has to improve a lot as far as the accessibility is concerned. There are some irksome issues & problems such as scrolling, Font clarity, keyboard accessibility etc that should be resolved for better & easier accessibility for everyone.

Here is a brief overview of some of the areas that you can work in Flash.

Vector Animation

Vector Animation is one of the main reasons of Flash's popularity. Basic drawing tools are advance enough to give you the power of creating astonishing animations & vector graphics while keeping small file sizes. Flash scripting adds the advantage of developing 3D content with extensive control over the objects.

Gif Animations & Animated Banner

With Flash you can create eye catching Gif Animations & banners, and Flash Mx let you create transparent banners that could stroll on your web page and disappears while grabbing more attention of the visitors.

Cartoon Film

Cartoon industry has also benefited a lot from the capabilities of Flash. Cartoon movies for several different mediums can be created in Flash. These movies are basically created on multiple scenes, and these scenes are loaded one over another to create movies of big lengths.

Home Movie

Flash Mx incorporate very powerful movie handling capabilities, especially for the web. You can import movies in different formats, add effects and export back for viewing over different mediums. On other hand Flash Mx lets you stream your movies over the web very efficiently.

Multimedia Presentations

Flash's primitive templates let you develop presentations very quickly. You can insert sounds, graphics, movies, and bring interaction to make your presentation more effective and attractive.

Web Applications & Web Services

Powerful scripting capabilities & XML integration gives you the freedom of developing dynamic web applications or utilizing existing web services with complete control.

Graphics for handheld devices

With Flash MX you can design graphics and animations for hand held devices as well. Templates are available for different cell phones.

Games

With Flash's Object Oriented Programming capabilities you can develop highly interactive games both for online & offline playing.

Flash Websites

Dynamic, scalable, highly interactive interfaces and swift in downloading are some of major credentials of websites created using Flash. The features like LoadMovie allows you throw the different parts of websites as they are asked, instead of downloading the whole website at once. Flash Mx provides you the advance feature of "Library Objects Sharing" to make your website even more efficient in loading over the web.

Related Links

www.macromedia.com

Well-Designed Flash Websites

www.2advanced.com

www.toma10.com

Tutorials & Flash Stuff

www.flashkit.com

www.flashadvisor.com

www.newtutorials.com/flash-tutorials.htm

www.fordvehicles.com

Tech Words

XML: Xtensible Markup Language. A subset of SGML constituting a particular text markup language for interchange of structured data. The Unicode Standard is the reference character set for XML content. (See also SGML and fancy text.) XML is a trademark of the World Wide Web Consortium.

Web Service: A Web service is a software system identified by a URI, whose public interfaces and bindings are defined and described using XML. Its definition can be discovered by other software systems. These systems may then interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its definition, using XML based messages conveyed by Internet protocols.

Object Oriented Programming: OOP = Type-extensibility + Polymorphism. Programming paradigm beyond and including data abstraction facilities. Basic support needed consists of a class mechanism with inheritance and a mechanism that allows calls of member functions to depend on the actual type of an object (in cases where the actual type is unknown at compile time).

Video Streaming: A method for transferring video such that it can be processed as a firm and continuous stream. With streaming, the client can start presenting the data before the whole file has been transmitted.

(“Tech Word” definitions from “Google Web Definitions”)

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