Adobe Flash Application

In the next few blog posts I will be talking how I am learning developing Adobe Flash application/advertisements/animations etc. I do know a very little about flash even though I have done some Flex development before using Flex Builder/Flash Builder IDE which also involved some Actionscript coding. I also do have some other programming languages knowledge like C, C++, JAVA, JSP. I do know a little about JavaScript and PHP. The point of telling a little about my programming experience is that it will give you an idea that I already know a little about programming and I am not totally novice. Enough about me - lets dive into developing flash application.

First thing first - what is Flash and what is Flash Professional? Well let me first try to tell you what only "Flash" or "Flash Player" means to the general computer users who surf internet, play games and also watch online videos: ff you google search about Adobe Flash then you will get a zillion different definitions about it but I see it this way Flash Player is just a player which can play animations, video. With its animation capabilities come great user experience, animated video games, rich user interface and many animated advertisements. According to some  statistics about 70% to 80% videos that are being watched every day are through Flash player. More than 95% PC/Mac in the world have Flash player installed in them. So the bottom line is:

"Flash Player or Flash runtime is something or some soft of player which helps us to view videos and also helps us to experience all sorts of smooth animations that we experience every day while surfing internet."

Now what is Flash Professional- in one sentence it is a environment which lets you develop animations, user interface etc. that will be played on Flash player. Suppose you want a banner on top of your personal webpage where you want the banner to have some animations. You want first a photo of yours to smoothly move from right to left followed by a sentence - "Hi this is Jeff, welcome to my page". How will you create this banner? Well, that is where Flash Professional comes in. You can define the banner size and its animation and other properties in either in Actionscript code or by using helpful tools from Flash Professional(which we will learn together). Once your banner's animation is defined - you will compile, run and release the banner. The Flash Builder will save the animated banner as a .swf file (like banner.swf) and all you will need to do is to place that .swf file in your page. Look at the following animation:





It is Flash player or the Flash runtime that is enabling us to view this above animation and this animation was created with the help of Flash professional. Here is how Flash professional looks like when you start it:

What is Flash 9, Flash 10, Flash CS4, Flash CS5, Flash 8, Flash MX? Well like all the technologies the Flash player and also the Flash Professional also evolved and improved. When you are usually talking about Flash 9 or Flash 10 we usually mean that it is Flash player. When we talk about Flash CS4, Flash MX or Flash CS5 it is the Flash Professional tool that creates the flash animation or flash movie clip. To see the list of all the Flash development tool version and also the Flash player list please visit the following link and see the history section:

                                http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash

In the next blog post I will be talking about how to download and install Flash Professional CS5 which will enable us to create Flash movie clip.

By the way here is how adobe explain what Flash is: