Adobe Flash Player

The Macromedia Flash Player is a multimedia and application player created and distributed by Macromedia (a division of Adobe Systems). Although Macromedia has been acquired by by Adobe, the software is still known as "Macromedia Flash Player", not "Adobe Flash Player", contrary to some speculation. This can be seen at the companies' web sites, in information relating to products, and the entities themselves. Flash Player runs SWF files that can be created by the Macromedia Flash authoring tool, Macromedia Flex or a number of other Macromedia and third party tools.

Flash Player has support for an embedded scripting language called ActionScript (AS), which is based on ECMAScript. Over the years, AS has evolved from a primitive script that didn't even support variables to a respectable programming script that can be used to make rather complex games and other applications.

The Flash Player was originally designed to display 2-dimensional vector animation, but has since evolved to support Rich Internet Applications and streaming video and audio. Today, most web browsers have Flash Player built-in, and can view Flash files right on web pages as if they were images. The Flash files themselves usually consist of vector graphics, meaning that instead of rendering individual pixels, Flash Player renders lines and fills to create dynamic shapes that can be adapted in real time. Because of this, most Flash movies tend to have more of a cartoon-look as opposed to a realistic appearance. This is not so much a bad thing, however, because it makes web-based animations and simple programs/games very easy to deliver to wide audiences, and because of the way Flash compresses SWF's, even ten-minute-long Flash movies will usually have a file size in mb that can be counted on one hand.

Of course, Flash Player is not without limitations. A standalone version of Flash Player is not provided by Macromedia (you must download the entire trial of Flash in order to get it), and in the most recent version of Flash Player in particular, a number of users have experienced problems with installation and use. Hopefully, such problems will be fixed by the time Flash Player 9 rolls around.

Supported Platforms

The Flash Player is available on a wide range of platforms, operating systems, and devices, including GNU/Linux x86, Windows, Mac OS 9/X, Solaris, HP-UX, Pocket PC, OS/2, Symbian OS, Palm OS, BeOS, IRIX, and, soon Playstation Portable

Approximately 95% of PCs have some version of the Flash Player installed, making it a very attractive development and animation platform for developers. New versions of Flash player typically take about a year to achieve 85% market penetration.

Flash is being rapidly adapted to deliver mobile phone content, with the number of mobiles phones supporting Flash Lite increasing substantially year-by-year. In addition to phones, Sony and Playstation Portable homebrew devs have created a prototype Flash player for PSP. Sony has also announced that their newest Playstation Portable firmware, 2.7, will include Flash Player 6 built into the web browser.

History

Player versions

(Note: Now Macromedia Flash Player has been rebranded to Adobe Flash Player.)

• Macromedia Flash Player 2
  • First version under Macromedia brand
  • Mostly vectors and motion, some bitmaps, limited audio
• Macromedia Flash Player 3
  • Added alpha transparency, licensed MP3 compression
• Macromedia Flash Player 4
• Macromedia Flash Player 5
• Macromedia Flash Player 6 (March 2002)
  • Support for the consuming Flash Remoting and Web Service (SOAP)
  • Support for screenreaders via Microsoft Active Accessibility
  • Added Sorenson Sparc video codec
• Macromedia Flash Player 7 (September 2003)
  • supports streaming audio and video
  • supports ActionScript 2.0, an Object-Oriented Programming Language for developers
• Macromedia Flash Player 8 (August 2005)
  • support of GIF and PNG bitmapped images
  • new video codec
  • improved runtime performance
  • live filters such as blur and drop shadow
  • file upload and download capabilities
  • crisp pixel-perfect text rendering
  • adds On2 VP6 video codec

• Flash Player Lite 1.0 and 1.1
  • Based on Flash Player 4
• Flash Lite 2.0 (December 2005)
  • Based on Flash Player 7

Future Flash Players

• Flash Player (9) [Alpha 2] (Prevously Named Flash Player 8.5)
  • Actionscript 3
  • new ECMAScript scripting engine, order-of-magnitude faster

See also

• Macromedia Shockwave Player

External links

• Macromedia.com Official Flash Player information and download page
• Flash Movie Player - freeware 3rd party Flash player for Windows with extended functionality (based on the Macromedia Flash Player)
• Gnash - GNU project to develop a fully-functional open-source Flash player