Flash is going through a pretty tough time right now. Apple's Steve Jobs, reportedly, hates it. Consumers seem to think it's bloated and unsafeat least that's the commonly held wisdom. For me, though, Flash is one of the Web's more sublime technologies, one I've known and used for more than 15 years.
It was 1994 or 1995 and I was attending Internet World in San Jose, CA. Back then it was a tiny show, with embarrassingly small booths. In one row (and there very well may have been only one row), there was a little company called Future Wave. It was showing off something called Future Splash, which allowed you to create surprisingly sophisticated, for its day, Web animations based on Bezier artwork. Up until then, essentially, Web cartoons were GIF animations.
As an amateur artist, I was immediately smitten. The company was so tiny, but I knew it could be a game changer. It came out with a few updates. Then Macromedia bought them and changed the name of the product to Flash. Over the years, Flash's impressive animation capabilities became almost secondary to its programmability and its ability to deliver online video. During this time, Macromedia was swallowed up by Adobe, which worked hard to make Flash an even richer platform. Most recently, Adobe introduced Air, which allows Flash applications to run offline and outside the browser.
Over all, it's quite the success story. Yet, these days, Adobe spends as much time defending Flash as it does promoting and developing it.
It was 1994 or 1995 and I was attending Internet World in San Jose, CA. Back then it was a tiny show, with embarrassingly small booths. In one row (and there very well may have been only one row), there was a little company called Future Wave. It was showing off something called Future Splash, which allowed you to create surprisingly sophisticated, for its day, Web animations based on Bezier artwork. Up until then, essentially, Web cartoons were GIF animations.
As an amateur artist, I was immediately smitten. The company was so tiny, but I knew it could be a game changer. It came out with a few updates. Then Macromedia bought them and changed the name of the product to Flash. Over the years, Flash's impressive animation capabilities became almost secondary to its programmability and its ability to deliver online video. During this time, Macromedia was swallowed up by Adobe, which worked hard to make Flash an even richer platform. Most recently, Adobe introduced Air, which allows Flash applications to run offline and outside the browser.
Over all, it's quite the success story. Yet, these days, Adobe spends as much time defending Flash as it does promoting and developing it.
