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Free Flash Games
Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash ) is a multimedia platform that is popular for adding animation and interactivity to web pages. Originally acquired by Macromedia, Flash was introduced in 1996, and is currently developed and distributed by Adobe Systems.
Flash is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, and various web page Flash components, to integrate video into web pages, and more recently, to develop rich Internet applications. Flash can manipulate vector and raster graphics, and supports bidirectional streaming of audio and video. It contains a scripting language called ActionScript. Several software products, systems, and devices are able to create or display Flash content, including Adobe Flash Player, which is available free for most common web browsers, some mobile phones and for other electronic devices (using Flash Lite).
Files in the SWF format, traditionally called " S hock W ave F lash" movies, "Flash movies" or "Flash games", usually have a .swf file extension and may be an object of a web page, strictly "played" in a standalone Flash Player, or incorporated into a Projector, a self-executing Flash movie (with the .exe extension in Microsoft Windows). Flash Video files have a .flv file extension and are either used from within .swf files or played through a flv-aware player, such as VLC, or QuickTime and Windows Media Player with external codecs added.
History
The precursor to the Flash application was SmartSketch, a drawing application for pen computers running the PenPoint OS developed by Jonathan Gay, who began working on it in college and extended the idea for Silicon Beach Software and its successors.
When PenPoint failed in the marketplace, SmartSketch was ported to Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. With the Internet becoming more popular, SmartSketch was re-released as FutureSplash, a vector-based web animation in competition with Macromedia Shockwave. In 1995, SmartSketch was further modified with frame-by-frame animation features and re-released as FutureSplash Animator on multiple platforms. The product was offered to Adobe and used by Microsoft in its early work with the Internet (MSN). In 1996, FutureSplash was acquired by Macromedia and released as Flash, contracting "Future" and "Splash".
Recent developments
Adobe Labs
(previously called
Macromedia Labs
) is a source for news and pre-release versions of emerging products and technologies from Adobe. Most innovations, such as Flash 9, Flex 3, and ActionScript 3.0 have all been discussed and/or trialled on the site.
One area Adobe is focusing on (as of February 2009) is the deployment of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). To this end, they released Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), a cross-platform runtime environment which can be used to build, using Adobe Flash, rich Internet applications that can be deployed as a desktop application. It recently surpassed 100 million installations worldwide.
Two additional components designed for large-scale implementation have been proposed by Adobe for future releases of Flash: first, the option to require an ad to be played in full before the main video piece is played; and second, the integration of digital rights management (DRM) capabilities. This way Adobe can give companies the option to link an advertisement with content and make sure that both are played and remain unchanged. The current status of these two projects is unclear.
Flash Player for smart phones is expected to be available to handset manufacturers at the end of 2009.
Open Screen Project
On May 1, 2008 Adobe announced Open Screen Project , which hopes to provide a consistent application interface across devices such as personal computers, mobile devices and consumer electronics. When the project was announced, several goals were outlined: the abolition of licensing fees for Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Integrated Runtime, the removal of restrictions on the use of the Shockwave Flash (SWF) and Flash Video (FLV) file format, the publishing of application programming interfaces for porting Flash to new devices and the publishing of The Flash Cast protocol and Action Message Format (AMF), which let Flash applications receive information from remote databases.
As of February 2009, the specifications removing the restrictions on the use of SWF and FLV/F4V specs have been published. The Flash Cast protocol—now known as the Mobile Content Delivery Protocol—and AMF protocols have also been made available, with AMF available as an open source implementation, BlazeDS. Work on the device porting layers is in the early stages. Adobe intends to remove the licensing fees for Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices at their release for the Open Screen Project.
The list of mobile device providers who have joined the project includes Palm, Motorola and Nokia, who, together with Adobe, have announced a $10 million Open Screen Project fund.
Usage
Format and plug-in
Compared to other plug-ins such as Java, Acrobat Reader, QuickTime, or Windows Media Player, the Flash Player has a small install size, quick download time, and fast initialization time. However, care must be taken to detect and embed the Flash Player in (X)HTML in a W3C-compliant way. A simple, widely-used workaround is provided below:
<object
data
=
"movie.swf"
type
=
"application/x-shockwave-flash"
width
=
"500"
height
=
"500"
>
<param
name
=
"movie"
value
=
"movie.swf"
/>
</object
>
More information on how to detect and embed Flash Objects in a W3C compliant way is provided in the xSWF description.
The use of vector graphics combined with program code allows Flash files to be smaller — and thus for streams to use less bandwidth — than the corresponding bitmaps or video clips. For content in a single format (such as just text, video, or audio), other alternatives may provide better performance and consume less CPU power than the corresponding Flash movie, for example when using transparency or making large screen updates such as photographic or text fades.
In addition to a vector-rendering engine, the Flash Player includes a virtual machine called the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM) for scripting interactivity at run-time, support for video, MP3-based audio, and bitmap graphics. As of Flash Player 8, it offers two video codecs: On2 Technologies VP6 and Sorenson Spark, and run-time support for JPEG, Progressive JPEG, PNG, and GIF. In the next version, Flash is slated to use a just-in-time compiler for the ActionScript engine.
Animation
Flash can display moving text and still images. This is different from video, where each frame is a new image.
Interactivity
Flash can capture user input via mouse, keyboard, microphone and camera. Using such input, the flash programmer can create an interactive user interface.
Video
Flash can be used to embed video in web pages, a feature available since Flash Player version 6. The technique is to create a flash file (.swf) that provides a user interface for playing the video file, a so called "player". This is what many popular video sites do, including YouTube and Google Video. The actual video file is either an FLV or F4V file; both can easily be played by generic video player software. However, getting browsers to display video has traditionally been a platform specific issue due to lack of a web standard for video and a common video codec. Using Flash has the advantage of Flash Player's wide distribution, but as this is proprietary technology for which there is no real alternative, it also makes multimedia embedded in this way notoriously difficult to access for non-users of the Flash Player. A similar paradox is that while Flash as a format arguably is a de facto standard, it hardly qualifies as a standard, as there is only one complete implementation, that implementation is proprietary, and a free-software partial implementation (rtmpdump) was thought to be illegal in the USA . A web standard for video is in development for HTML 5.
Flash Player is a browser plugin, and cannot run within a usual e-mail client, such as Outlook. Instead, a link must open a browser window. A Gmail labs feature allows playback of YouTube videos linked in emails.
Flash Video
Main article: Flash VideoFlash Video FLV and F4V are container formats, meaning that they are not a video codec itself. The FLV file format was at first used as one of ways for feeding data to Flash Media Server since Flash Player 6. Flash Player can play FLV files directly (MIME type video/x-flv) starting with version 7. The new F4V file format is supported starting with Flash Player version 9 Update 3. The F4V file format is based on the ISO base media file format (MPEG-4 Part 12) and it is completely different from the FLV file format. For example, F4V does not support Screen video, Sorenson Spark, VP6 video compression formats and ADPCM, Nellymoser audio compression formats.
The video in early versions of Flash is encoded in Sorenson Spark (Sorenson H.263). In Flash 8 it may be encoded in Sorenson Spark or ON2V (also known as VP6) which provided a greater effi
