Flash, by Macromedia, has evolved into the number one multimedia tool for building sexy, animated Web sites. You know the ones: fly-out menus and little sparkles flying around the screen, chasing your mouse, while playing hi-fi music. Every element spins and jumps and sings a little song when your mouse passes over it.
It's hard to argue with success. By combining quick-loading vector graphics with a drag-and-drop interface, Flash has earned a place in the toolkit of many professional Web developers, making it the undisputed champ for adding interactive animation to Web sites. If you're looking to bring movement and sound to an otherwise lifeless Web site, you won't find a more powerful package.
Flash is now used to create all kinds of site content, such as games, cartoons, advertisements and jukeboxes. Perhaps its most significant role however is for creating interfaces for all those different types of sites. Its ability to present a clean, friendly and functional front end to the user is coupled with its power behind the scenes. Flash is loved by designers for its speed, quality, ease of use and clearly structured functionality, while at the same time, programmers and designers can use its programming language-- ActionScript--to produce even more phenomenal results. Whatever kind of interface you want to build for a web site, Flash has the answer.
Macromedia has taken another step forward by making Flash compatible with many other software programs and languages in addition to their own suite of software packages. Macromedia's Dreamweaver is an excellent program to implement Flash animations into HTML coding. Flash also has support for the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which is already a web standard for disseminating data in a form that can be interpreted anywhere, on any device, and rendered according to the abilities of that device and the needs of the user. Adding 3D elements to your work is even possible with Flash by importing and exporting files from it with a plug-in or two and programs such as 3D Studio Max, Poser 4, and Amorphium Pro. Freehand and Photoshop are also crucial programs for enhancing your Flash abilities.
With all these compatibilities coupled with its own powerful engine, Flash is now capable of producing fully functional web applications that are rich in graphics, sound and interactivity. And it's this interactivity--building applications for e-commerce, entertainment, community sites replete with chat rooms and all the rest of it--that will be big in Flash's future. Flash can now talk to web servers in a highly sophisticated way, meaning that dynamic content is within the reach of everyone using just a little ActionScript. This flexibility and continued innovations proves that today's online multimedia has a face, Macromedia's Flash, and that the possibilities are endless.