Flash or Shockwave, Cont.

The latest version of Director, Director 7 Internet Studio [Director 8 was just released - March-2000], is intentionally focused more on the web. It has better compression than previous versions, and has some neat Internet features. The interactivity is far more advanced than that of Flash. Director can create entire programs for the web, much like Java can. In fact Director 7 can output Java files.

Enabling you to publish Director files on the web, for all kinds of platforms, using all Director's standard features is quite an accomplishment. Still, Director lacks some of the flexibility that Flash has.

Flash

While Director was created for offline programs, Flash was born to be webbed.

Created to animate banners, Futuresplash (later named Flash) incorporated simple animation controls, like zoom and rotate - and even gradients. However - the real strength was the fact that it was completely vector based.

In vector graphics mathematical equations direct the monitor to display objects of specific colors, shapes, and sizes. This creates far smaller files (the number of bytes of code, not the size of the image) than the alternative: raster (or bit-mapped) graphics like GIFs or JPEGs. A typical Flash animation may be ten times smaller than a similar animated GIF, resulting in files that transfer from server to browser many times faster. In addition to their small file size and the resulting fast transfer speed, vector graphics are scalable: you can zoom in on an image without the loss of sharpness and "jaggies" of raster graphics.

The animation to the right is in the Futuresplash/Flash 1 format. It is only 932 bytes. The animation to the left is an animated GIF, and is 11 times larger (!).

Since the Flash Player is backwards compatible, it should be playable with any and all Flash Players. If you have problems viewing this file, click here.

All this, combined with a very lightweight plugin (150 - 200 K), made Futuresplash a must-have for Macromedia, whose business-strategy had become more and more Internet-focused.

Futuresplash, re-named Flash, evolved quickly after the acquisition. In Flash 2, webdesigners utilized Flash to create websites instead of just lightweight banners. Flash 3 came with some important and long-awaited features, like transparency, morphing and improved interactivity. Today, Flash is in a version 4, with MP3 support [a highly compressed sound format], text fields and full interactivity.

As mentioned, Flash is capable of interactivity and e-commerce. Basically, anything you can do with HTML and Javascript, can be done with Flash, only more visually pleasing.