Macromedia Flash MX Course
Macromedia Course Dates & Pricing

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It is sometimes said that the World Wide Web is the fastest growing technology in the history of mankind. From the birth in Switzerland of HTML in 1991, the Web has grown to encompass every facet of our lives. Research, entertainment, information and news, business, data transfer - it's all available via the web. What's more, it's often available faster and cheaper than via any other means. After all, if you want to know how many teeth an adult Egyptian Mongoose has, you can either get on a bus (or into your car), go to the library and spend 10 minutes looking the information up before driving (or bussing) home again, or you can simply hook up a PC to the web and look there.

And yet, there is a technology that has grown alongside the web, and arguably has grown even faster than it. Macromedia introduced Flash version 1 to the world at the start of 1997. It allowed developers to produce animations, including sound and interactive content for display on web pages. The Flash Player, a component that can be downloaded and installed into Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator or a host of other browsers to allows the viewing of these animations. By 2001, just 5 years after the launch of Flash, there had been over 325 million downloads of the player - perhaps more (according to Macromedia) than there had been of Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator or RealPlayer, and of course, in much less time.

So, what exactly is Flash?

It is a drawing and animation package designed to work with vector graphics. It creates animations which can include sounds, music and interactivity, and which are optimised for use on the web. To that end, the files it produces are small and designed for streaming. Furthermore, all the elements which form part of a flash movie are embedded within the movie. This means that, unlike a standard web page which relies on the fonts and resources on the client machine, as long as the user has the flash player installed, the movie will play exactly as you design it. If the user hasn't got the font you used - it doesn't matter; it's rendered as an element of the movie and the user will still see it

Flash files used can be designed as a small part of a page - such as an animated version of a logo - or as the basis for an entire site. (See figure 1)

Figure 1 - A Flash movie

To see examples of complete flash-driven sites, try visiting: http://www.eye4u.com http://www.miniusa.com http://www.terminator3.com (Please note, these are external websites and PTR Associates has no responsibility for the content and materials on them).

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