(1) The most common non-volatile storage technology. See flash memory.
(2) A telephone button. See flash button.
(3) An extremely popular multimedia authoring and playback system from Adobe. Flash is used for most of the animated ads and video clips on Web sites, and Flash Lite is a version for mobile phones.
Created in authoring applications, such as Flash MX and Flash Professional, Flash animations are viewed in any computer that has the Flash Player installed. Flash animations support space-efficient vector images, which download quickly; a feature that helped catapult Flash to success when dial-up access was the norm (see vector graphics).
Animations Are Choreographed
To create an animation, the Flash designer imports graphics, sound and video elements created in other applications, places them on sequential timelines and defines their interaction. The timelines and elements are saved in an .FLA source file and published to an .SWF file for playback (see SWF).
Flash Movies: Animations and Video
Flash also provides a video format that uses the .FLV extension. Both Flash animations (SWFs) and Flash videos (FLVs) can be referred to as "Flash movies." However, SWF animation files may contain some video, but FLV video files are entirely video. See Flash video.
Flash Applications
As of Flash Version 5, Flash became fully programmable, enabling the creation of interactive Web-based applications (see Flex). Flash was created by Macromedia and introduced in 1996. In 2005, Adobe acquired the company.
Animation Authoring
Objects are placed in separate timelines that move in sequence. Although this software has basic drawing and painting tools (top left), multimedia elements are typically imported.
SWFPRSTK.SWF
Animation Playback
This is the .SWF animation generated from the .FLA file above. For more about the subject of this animation, see protocol stack.
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