Overview

Adobe Flash is an authoring environment for creating multimedia and interactive content. Flash animations are commonly developed for websites, and may be used for advertisements, navigation menus, video playback interfaces, or online games. They can also be saved as standalone .SWF files for playback in Flash Player. Flash supports vector and raster graphics and can be scripted using the ActionScript programming language.

User Interface

Flash provides multiple views for video, graphics, and source code editing. The main document window includes a timeline and motion editor, which is used for creating and editing animation sequences. The tool palettes allow users to access project assets (e.g., video, image, and audio files), modify objects, and alter project settings.

Capabilities

Flash gives users complete control over object motion. The motion editor supports object-based animation, which can apply tweening (interpolated transitional frames) to objects rather than keyframes. Flash also supports Bezier splines for adding curve-based object animations to individual object attributes and includes advanced motion features to animate 2D objects through 3D space. Users may also create chain-like animation effects by linking objects in a series.

Flash provides development tools for creating custom ActionScript code, which can be used to create interactive content. The code editor supports syntax highlighting and helps reduce development time with code collapse, comment tags, and code error navigation features. Flash includes a visual user interface for script editing that enables automatic syntax completion. It also provides an advanced debugger to manually step through code and identify script errors.

User Community

The Flash community is comprised of a wide range of professional users. It is commonly used by Web developers to create website advertisements and online videos. Multimedia producers may also use Flash to create online games and other media-rich Internet applications. The Flash .SWF ("swiff") export format is also the standard video format used for YouTube videos.

Screenshots:

Welcome	Templates	Movie Editing
ActionScript Editing	Open File Types	Export File Types

Features:

• Industry-leading authoring environment for rich Internet content
• Object-based animation with motion paths
• ActionScript scripting language
• 3D translation and rotation tools
• Support for many image, video, and audio file formats
• Built-in drawing capabilities

System Requirements:

Mac OS

• Mac OS X v10.6 or 10.7
• Multicore Intel processor
• 2GB RAM
• 4GB free disk space
• 1024x768 display
• DVD-ROM drive
• Java Runtime Environment 1.6
• QuickTime 7.6.6 for multimedia features
• Broadband Internet connection for online services

Windows

• Windows XP w/ SP or Windows 7
• Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64 processor
• 2GB RAM
• 3.5GB free disk space
• 1024x768 display with 16-bit
• DVD-ROM drive
• Java Runtime Environment 1.6
• QuickTime 7.6.6 for multimedia features
• Broadband Internet connection for online services