by Thomas Dickinson

Created on: December 20, 2006   Last Updated: May 19, 2007

Flash is a powerful program which is widely used on the Internet. Now Adobe Flash the program was called previous called Macromedia Flash and even before that FutureSplash Animator. Flash is an extremely powerful piece of software and has many features which allow it to for fill a large spectrum of uses. The main uses are as follows:

Animator

Flash has a very simple interface which allows the user to easily create a professional animation. This is mainly because the graphics are vector based but you can incorporate raster images if you wish. Vector graphics mean that the picture is made of points that the computer joins together to form the image meaning the picture will never become pixleated however big you make the image unlike raster graphics which are made of pixels and will become pixleated when the image is enlarged. There is also a very easy to use time line which you can easily create new layers on and create frames easily. The ability to create an object on a frame that can loop so if you wanted you could make a movieclip of a man walking and place it on a block of frames then when the movie is he will walk throughout those frames. The library gives you quick access to the frequently used graphics and movieclips so you can speed up the time it takes. Finally the tween tool allows you to morph between two frames very easily and move object along the screen you can even make an object follow a invisible line with the tween.

Development Software

By development software I mean a program in which you can make another program. Flash have its own script built into it which allows you to attach programming onto the timeline. This allows you to make objects on the frame move and change, work out calculations and process inputs in the form of key presses, mouse movements and even web cam movements. In short you can use Flash to make games, programs, video interfaces and practical anything you can think of.

Image Creation And Manipulation

I have already told you about the graphics interface on flash in the section on Flash's animator capabilities, however, Flash has even more for image manipulation. The many tools allow you to draw in vector and Flash even has a tool to change raster images into vector cartoon. Flash is best for creating cartoon images but its simplified interface makes it many peoples chose over one of the larger image programs like Photoshop.

Flash is also compatible with most Internet browsers and its produce can be seen almost everywhere. It also goes side by side with Adobe Dreamweaver which allows you to easily create web pages with flash windows incorporated but you can just use HTML (the code used to create most web pages).

Learn more about this author, Thomas Dickinson.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.