What is Flash?

Introduction


Last week we learned a software called Windows Photo Story. While software like that (and other video software such as Windows Movie Maker and Sony Movie Studio) is great for learning out to edit videos and save them on your hard drives, it is not good to put them on the internet. What is that? Well, some say that the single biggest technology hurdle we face is bandwidth. Bandwidth is the amount of data passed from computers at a fixed time. Big files sizes on websites means very slow loading of the pages. Nobody likes to wait. So the dilemma that we face is: how can we put exciting animation (and videos) on the internet without having our users of these pages wait too long?

Flash is our solution. It is a way that we can make web animations and entire websites that do not have the extremely large files sizes that other video software has.

Flash Animations


Animations made in flash are vector. Vector images lack photo realism. but are much smaller file sizes. One advantage is that the graphics are scaleable and will not become pixelated. Other advantages of flash include: the ability to compress sound files, interactivity with the users, automatic antialiasing (which takes the jaggedness of text away) and Action Script (which is a language Flash uses based on JavaScript Core Language).


Here are some example flash animations:


Entire Flash Websites


Not only is Flash good to make animations to put on the web, it is also an excellent way to make a website. Here is a list of some good websites made entirely in Flash: