Macromedia Flash

Macromedia Flash, or simply Flash, refers to both a multimedia authoring program and the Macromedia Flash Player, written and distributed by Macromedia (recently targeted for acquisition by Adobe Systems), that utilizes vector and raster graphics, a native scripting language called ActionScript and bidirectional streaming of video and audio. Strictly speaking, Macromedia Flash is the authoring environment and Flash Player is the virtual machine application used to run the Flash files, but in colloquial language these have become mixed: "Flash" can mean either the authoring environment, the player or the application files.

Future developments

Attendees at selected Macromedia seminars and conferences in 2004 previewed some future features of the Flash player (version 8). The most notable new features included realtime video alpha channels, a new advanced font-rendering engine, and improved Flash player detection and bitmap effects (blurs, drop shadows). Video alpha channels allow Flash to display video clips with transparency. The example SWF shown used a video clip of a person walking across the screen while the background video clip could be changed by clicking separate buttons. The clip of the person blended seamlessly into whichever background was selected.

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Flash guru Colin Moock has written about some of the new features and provides video clips from Macromedia's presentation in Tokyo.

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