Adobe Flash

Software Overview

Adobe Flash was an authoring environment for creating multimedia and interactive content for web, desktop, and mobile applications. Some examples of content created with Flash include advertisements, navigation menus, video playback interfaces, and online games. Flash became Adobe Animate in 2016, and Adobe discontinued all support for Flash-related software on December 31, 2020.

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.

Flash provides development tools for creating custom ActionScript code, which can be used to script interactive content that includes vector and raster graphics. 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.

Flash also 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. Animations can also be saved as standalone .SWF files for playback in Flash Player.

Summary

While it is now discontinued, Adobe Flash was a good tool for web developers who created website advertisements and online videos. It was also useful for multimedia producers who create online games and other media-rich Internet applications. If you fall into either of these categories now, you should try Adobe Animate.

Primary File Type

.FLAAnimate Animation

Supported File Types

Additional Related File Types