The
first time I saw Flash was around a decade back when it was at its
5th
edition. Flash 5, those days came along with Flash Player 5 and
ActionScript 1.0 . Normally it was fancy animating pack but even had
support to XML and HTML text formatting. And since 1996, Flash has
its 10th
edition released form FutureSplash Animator aka. Macromedia Flash 1
to Adobe Flash CS4 aka Adobe Flash 10. Adobe Flash of today, got its
name from the FutureSplash
Animator. FutureSplash before being acquired by Macromedia, it was
offered to Adobe and used by Microsoft with Internet [MSN]. Since
then, Flash is developed and distributed for the purpose of
animation, advertisement, web video streaming and most recently to
develop Rich Internet Applications.When
starting plunging inside this Adobe product, you find that it is good
with vector and raster graphics along with bidirectional audio and
video streaming. It too has its own programming language, the
ActionScript and in its recent forms you can enjoy inverse
kinematics [working with bones], 3D object manipulation and object
based animation. Unknowingly each one of us, who thinks he is a
technology guy, uses this product, in or among its many forms. Like
in web browser, mobile phones and other electronic devices using
either Flash Player or Flash Lite.We use Flash Web Applications,
games, movies and content for mobile phone and even in some embedded
devices.Prior
to the current available contours of Flash, since the era of
FutureSplash, this application survives on the concept of
frame-by-frame animation system. It means that anyone interested in
animating with Flash needs to know that a animation simulation is
just a playback of sequential photographs. Implies every animation or
movie is composed of Frames. Each frame is a picture and altering
the frames in some considerable speed makes it animate. Try it! You
just need to draw some sequential images in the fixed position of
your copy and flicker the pages, you have your first animation.Programming
with Flash is more fun than animating with it. And is even more time
saving. ActionScript, the programming language of Flash is an
implementation of ECMAScript standard. Means its syntax is like that
of JavaScript. Its not that important to remember the standard but
what matters is that, ActionScript in Flash enables higher level of
flexibility. In some cases of primitive version of animation, you
move a ball through the timeline using multiple frame. The animation
looks awesome. But when you do this by ActionScript, you can have a
grater control of it. One of my personal favorite is var
myTween:Tween = new Tween(myball, ”_x”, Regular.EaseOut, 0 , 255,
4, true);You
script this in timeline and this moves your object 'myball' form 0 to
255 position [pixels] in x-axis with the EaseOut [easing] effect in 4
seconds ! Isn't this interesting? And this time, you get more control
over your animation. And since you get more control over the
animation, you own your animation.Another
reason why I love ActionScript is that, its fun exploiting the object
oriented concept over here. Normally we have been creating classes
and objects, but even interacting with them doesn't provide us the
pleasure of using them as we do in Flash. I will explain it. Suppose
u create a class Dog and declare it some properties of height,
strength and so on and some behaviors of bark and run. Now normally
in other programming languages, you simply call bark behavior of dog
object but u cant see the effect you visualize it to be. I mean in
Flash, u create a the Dog class, and declare the function bark()
where u move the dog's mouth and produce sound. You even make the dog
run on calling the run() function. And now in this case, interacting
with the object you create is more fun because the dog really barks
when u call the function bark()! And we can see what our creativity
has given birth to. Its like creating own objects form own classes
and interacting with them.So
until we reached here, Flash was all about the fun and game stuff.
But ActionScript is powerful too. Most of us have heard about AJAX.
But AFAX ?? Its Asynchronous Flash And XML. This technology of AFAX
has pushed for more formal approach as Adobe Flex, which is Flash
runtime to built Rich Internet Application. We commonly know it as
Adobe AIR. Practical application of this technology is the video
players and the buffering system in web including MySpace and
YouTube. The content requested through XML and is streamed – or
passed – through the Flash files. Thus making the download of such
content a hair pulling experience. In this case, I think Flash is
being more proprietary. But some browser extensions like FlashGot or
FireBug can trace the XML request and download the streamed videos.
Fun and Power!Now
talking about code security, Flash runtime file or Shockwave Flash
file [.swf] is the compiled version of your Flash task, which can be
decompiled to access the original source code. This is what most of
the proprietary thinkers don't want to dream about. So these days,
Flash uses ActionScript obfuscators. They implement lexical
transformations like identifier renaming, control flow transformation
and data abstraction transformation, thus making it worst experience
to the decompiler generators. Here we have Security too!We all need to know that Flash is
that it is not always so holy. Like the HTTP cookie, a Flash cookie
[also known as Local Shared Object] can be used to save application
data or track users. Flash cookies are not shared across domains. It
is found that most of websites using Flash were also employing Flash
cookies, yet privacy policies rarely disclosed them, and user
controls for privacy preferences are lacking. Means your privacy is
not secure at all. And even since this Adobe product is been widely
used in web and because of the proprietary nature of Flash, it has
been damned for violation of web freedom due to its proprietary in
web video streaming. Moreover, Flash Player animates of top of
computer's video rendering, this some time issues as a burden to
slower computers with low hardware acceleration. And one last
bad-face of Fla is that, to date, it has no support to 64-bit
systems. So, 64-bit browser users are to face some problems regarding
web flash applications.But regardless its criticism,
Flash is considered as a finest product for web content development.
With the flexible features like interconnecting or linking swf files
and more gaming features, Flash supports more interactivity
development. Use of anti aliasing technology and moreover being light
to use, using Flash provides a different level of animation and
programming experiences.