Evolution Of Flash

Objective

• To get an insight of Flash through its history

• To understand where Flash Player stands out to other platforms

• To be able to leverage best from Flash platform (as a designer & a developer) knowing its features as well as limitations

Pre launch history

- Who was the author- What was the motivation to create something

like Flash- What it took to have first version of Flash (IDE)

on board

Who created Flash?

Jonathan GayFather of Flash

Jonathan Gay• Played LEGO in the time of childhood. Learned to solve the

problems for creating big structures.• Won an award in School in programming on an Apple II

computer. • 1985 - Created first product Airborne!, a black-and-white

game for the Macintosh computer.• Later (In College time) , created 2 other games Dark Castle &

Beyond Dark Castle with a colleague.

After the Games(working with Silicon Beach – later acquired by Aldus)

• Added PostScript support to SuperPaint II, a Macintosh product.SuperPaint was offering Bitmap & Vector graphics editing

• 1990 - Designed a new graphics editor IntelliDraw for Aldus which offered Vector graphics creation & editing. (Aldus was later acquired by Adobe)

A little about PostScript(owner: Adobe)

• PostScript is a dynamically typed programming language created by John Warnock who later founded Adobe Systems in 1982 with Chuck Geschke

• PostScript mainly given a solution to Printing that time, It was to have reliable printing on any PS supporting printer. i.e. Printing a pixel perfect page as seen in a graphic editor.

• PostScript was doing Paths, Fills, Bezier Curves & Transformation (scaling, rotating, etc) internally.

• PostScript later evolved as Display PostScript as there was a need to present documents on different screens. PDF (by Adobe) format is an example of it.

FutureWave & Smart Sketch (Pen Drawing)

• 1993 – Jonathan & Charlie Jackson founded FutureWave Software• 1994 – Released SmartSketch for EO Personal Communicator

• Communicator was not a big success, so was not Smart Sketch• A noticable sell of SmartSketch was to an Architect working on Bill Gates’

home that.

Future Splash • SmarkSketch was converted to run on Windows & Mac but there were big

competitors, Adobe Illustrator & FreeHand.• On people suggestion it was converted to an animation application called

Cell Animator, later named Future Splash• 1996 – Future Splash Animator was released with vector drawing &

timeline animation support, it could produce the files running in HTML pages using JAVA. Animation was very slow due to that.

• A Runtime to play animated files was introduced later as browser plugin when Netscape initiated that.

• Their first big Clients wereMSN & Disney

How this relates to current FlashPlayer

• The code written for SmartSketch to draw vectors & transform is still intact in most recent version of Flash Player

• This was a platform to support graphics manipulation at runtime in one of the most effective ways.

• Like PostScript given solution to printing, That plug-in (now Flash Player) given the solution to present rich graphics on different platforms.

Flash 1 to Flash 8(How Flash evolved in this period)

• 1996 – Macromedia acquired FutureWave & FutureSplash was name to Macomedia Flash & runtime became Flash Player

• Jonathan Gay actively worked on enhancing Flash Player during this period

• Support for ActionScript, Bitmap graphics, Audio, Video, Remoting other features was introduced in this period

Versions (by FlashPlayer)Macromedia Flash 1 1996 a Macromedia re-branded version of the FutureSplash Animator Macromedia Flash 2 1997 Released with Flash Player 2, new features included: the object library Macromedia Flash 3 1998 Released with Flash Player 3, new features included: the movieclip

element, JavaScript plug-in integration, transparency and an external stand alone player Macromedia Flash 4 1999 Released with Flash Player 4, new features included: internal variables,

an input field, advanced ActionScript, and streaming MP3 Macromedia Flash 5 2000 Released with Flash Player 5, new features included: ActionScript 1.0

(based on ECMAScript, making it very similar to JavaScript in syntax), XML support, Smartclips (the precursor to components in Flash), HTML text formatting added for dynamic text

Macromedia Flash MX(6) 2002 Released with Flash Player 6, new features included: a video codec (Sorenson Spark), Unicode, v1 UI Components, ActionScript vector drawing API

Macromedia Flash MX 2004(7) 2003 Released with Flash Player 7, new features included: Actionscript 2.0 (which enabled an object-oriented programming model for Flash), alias text support, timeline effects. Web services integration, Media Playback components, Data components (DataSet, XMLConnector, WebServicesConnector, XUpdateResolver, etc.) and data binding APIs, the Project Panel, v2 UI components, and Transition class libraries.

• Macromedia Flash 8 2005 Macromedia Flash Professional 8 added features focused on expressiveness, quality, video, and mobile authoring. New features included Filters and blend modes, easing control for animation, object-based drawing mode, run-time bitmap caching, FlashType advanced anti-aliasing for text, advanced video codec, support for alpha transparency in video, cue point support in FLV files others

Adobe & ActionScript 3.0• 2005 – Adobe acquired Macormedia • Jonathan Gay left & started a company Software as

Art• ActionScript 3.0 introduced, fully Object Oriented

having Event model with many new features• AVM 2 added to Flash Player to support ActionScript

3, which was a JIT Compiler, resulting in 10x runtime speed.

• Adobe Flex 2.0 also released along

Later Versions (FlashPlayer)Flash Player 9:

Added ActionScript 3.0 with AVM2Performance increases by including a new JIT compiler. Support for binary sockets, E4X XML parsing, full-screen mode and Regular Expressions were added.

Flash Player 10 Added basic 3D manipulation3D drawing APICustom filters using Adobe Pixel Bender. Can use GPU for processingDynamic Sound

Flash Player 11 (not yet released): Advanced 3D capabilities H264 encoding for cameras Native JSON supportA secure random number generator