Flash | Teleactivities

Posts Tagged ‘ Flash ’

Adobe Flash

Adobe_Flash_cs3 Developer(s) Adobe Systems (formerly by Macromedia)
Written in C++
Operating system Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X
Type Multimedia
License Proprietary EULA
Website Adobe Flash Professional Homepage

Adobe Flash, or simply Flash, refers to both the Adobe Flash Player, and to the Adobe Flash Professional multimedia authoring program. Adobe Flash Professional is used to create content for the Adobe Engagement Platform (such as web applications, games and movies, and content for mobile phones and other embedded devices). The Flash Player, developed and distributed by Adobe Systems (which acquired Macromedia in a merger that was finalized in December 2005), is a client application available in most common web browsers. It features support for vector and raster graphics, a scripting language called ActionScript and bi-directional streaming of audio and video. There are also versions of the Flash Player for mobile phones and other non-PC devices.

Strictly speaking, Adobe Flash Professional is an integrated development environment (IDE) while Flash Player is a virtual machine used to run, or parse, the Flash files. But in contemporary colloquial terms “Flash” can refer to the authoring environment, the player, or the application files.

Since its introduction in 1996, Flash technology has become a popular method for adding animation and interactivity to web pages; several software products, systems, and devices are able to create or display Flash. Flash is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, various web-page components, to integrate video into web pages, and more recently, to develop rich Internet applications.

The Flash files, traditionally called “Flash movies” or “Flash games”, have a .swf file extension and may be an object of a web page, strictly “played” in a standalone Flash Player, or incorporated into a Projector, a self-executing Flash movie with the .exe extension in Windows. Flash Video files have a .flv file extension and are utilized from within .swf files.

Web design

CSS Zen Garden

Web design is a process of conceptualization, planning, modeling, and execution of electronic media delivery via Internet in the form of Markup language suitable for interpretation by Web browser and display as Graphical user interface (GUI).

The intent of web design is to create a web site — a collection of electronic files that reside on a web server/servers and present content and interactive features/interfaces to the end user in form of Web pages once requested. Such elements as text, bit-mapped images (GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs), forms can be placed on the page using HTML/XHTML/XML tags. Displaying more complex media (vector graphics, animations, videos, sounds) requires plug-ins such as Flash, QuickTime, Java run-time environment, etc. Plug-ins are also embedded into web page by using HTML/XHTML tags.

Improvements in browsers’ compliance with W3C standards prompted a widespread acceptance and usage of XHTML/XML in conjunction with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to position and manipulate web page elements and objects. Latest standards and proposals aim at leading to browsers’ ability to deliver a wide variety of media and accessibility options to the client possibly without employing plug-ins.

Typically web pages are classified as static or dynamic.

Static pages don’t change content and layout with every request unless a human (web master/programmer) manually updates the page.

Dynamic pages adapt their content and/or appearance depending on end-user’s input/interaction or changes in the computing environment (user, time, database modifications, etc.) Content can be changed on the client side (end-user’s computer) by using client-side scripting languages (JavaScript, JScript, Actionscript, etc.) to alter DOM elements (DHTML). Dynamic content is often compiled on the server utilizing server-side scripting languages (Perl, PHP, ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, etc.). Both approaches are usually used in complex applications.

With growing specialization in the information technology field there is a strong tendency to draw a clear line between web design and web development.