Flash 4 review
SMW Staff Writer
12 - 01 - 00

What is Flash, and what can it do?

The web can be a mighty static place. A place with long white and black documents, occasionally with a blue link or two.
Or, it can be Flashed.
Macromedia Flash is in essence, a vector graphics technology for the web. Vectors are mathematical curves and lines, and are thus scalable. Using Flash, you can animate these vectors, play sound and music, and combine it with images.
Basically, web-multimedia.
The beauty of it is, that it plays streaming [playing while downloading], and due to Flash being vectorbased, the filesizes are extremely small.

While Flash is still plug-in technology, it is pre-installed in some platforms, and shipped with many others as a de-facto standard. And with the latest Flash 4 player, the automatic installation is so smooth that the plug-in issue should no longer be a reason not to use Flash.

The most important features in Flash v. 4

Flash has been a web multimedia technology ever since version 2. But the web is more than multimedia, and Macromedia has realised this. So in Flash 4, there are some important landmarks.

MP3 sound support

The most popular addition is probably the MP3 sound compression. MP3 is a very higly compressed sound format, that allows high quality sound at small filesizes.
Introducing this to Flash, may be an obvious next step for Flash, but the real problem has been the decompression phase. Flash requires quite a bit of computer power to render an animated website. MP3 also requires power to decompress. This is, fortunately, remedied by a built-in function that caches [remembers] the MP3 in memory, so the playback won't be slow.