About Flash

Flash began life as Future Splash Animator, a nifty little program for creating and animating vector art. In 1997, Macromedia acquired Future Splash, changed the name to Flash, and promoted the program as a tool for creating graphic content for the World Wide Web. The early Flash excelled as a tool for Web-site design providing everything needed to create visually interesting (as opposed to a text-only) Web sites: tools for creating graphic elements, for animating those elements, for creating interface elements and interactivity, and for writing the HTML necessary to display all those elements as a Web page via a browser. In addition to those tools, Flash 8 also includes ActionScript 2.0 for scripting complex interactivity, video-import tools, and data-handling components.

Each new generation of Flash adds features and functions that expand the program's capabilities. Originally centered on creating vector artwork, animation, and basic interactivity, Flash is now a toolkit for creating what have come to be called Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). An RIA might be anything from an online store to a corporate training module to a snazzy promotional piece describing this year's hottest new car, complete with customizable virtual test-drives. Yet the program preserves the easy-to-use drawing and animation tools that made it so popular to begin with. And Flash continues to assist authors with differing skill levels and different objectives to create the interactivity their projects require. The most recent version, Flash 8, comes in two flavors: Flash Basic 8 and Flash Professional 8. Both versions include design tools and scripting tools. Flash Professional 8 has extra features that will appeal particularly to people creating complex interactive sites or developing Flash Lite content (a streamlined version of Flash content that's delivered over mobile devices, such as phones).

Vectors vs. Bitmaps

The data that creates vector graphics and the data that creates bitmapped graphics are similar, in that they're mathematical instructions to the computer about how to create images onscreen. Bitmaps, however, are often lengthier and result in a less versatile graphic; vector graphics are compact and scaleable. Bitmap instructions break a whole graphic into dots and describe each one; vector instructions describe the graphic mathematically as a series of lines and arcs (Figure i.1). Picture a 1-inch black horizontal line on a field of white. For a bitmap, the instructions would go something like this: Make a white dot, make a white dot, make a black dot, make a black dot, make a black dot, repeating until there are enough black dots to make a 1-inch line. Then the white-dot instructions start again and continue to fill the rest of the screen with white dots. The vector instructions would be a formula for a straight line, plus the coordinates that define the line's position onscreen.

Figure i.1. For a computer to draw a bitmapped graphic, it must receive a set of instructions for each dot (each bit of data) that makes up the image. Instructions for a vector graphic describe the lines and curves that make up the image mathematically. The bitmapped line (left) appears much rougher than the vector line (right). You can't enlarge the bitmapped line without losing quality. But you can make the vector line as big as you like; it retains its solid appearance.