I recently visited a website that was quite astounding. Not only did the site load with blazing speed, it left me in amazement as its dazzling animations rolled across the screen. Upbeat music played smoothly and continously in the background as animated images swirled and danced and interacted with my mouse. The site I was viewing uses a relatively new technology called Flash (from Macromedia).
The bitmapped images you usually see when surfing the web (such as the image to the immediate right) are made up of tiny dots (pixels) of colored light. While these image formats have served the Internet community well for several years, they do have several drawbacks. Your browser draws these images one pixel at a time, which requires a considerable effort on the part of your machine. Most of the time you spend waiting for an ordinary web page to load is due to this painstaking pixel-by-pixel reproduction process. What's more, these types of images cannot easily be rescaled, moved, or rotated without significant distortion and loss in quality or resolution.
Flash images bring a much-needed improvement to the moribund world of Internet graphics. Unlike traditional graphics, Flash images are vector-based, which means that the images are defined using a series of simple mathematical equations. Computers excel at number-crunching, so they can effortlessly display vector-based images with a speed and level of detail that is simply not possible with conventional pixel-based images. Because Flash images are defined mathematically, your computer can rotate, resize, or set Flash images in motion simply by tweaking a few mathematical variables.
So...what's the catch? In order to view pages utilizing Flash technology, you must have a Flash Web Player plugged into your browser. While this may initially sound like more trouble than it is worth, I assure you the process is short, sweet, and free! The Flash Web Player plug-in is compatible with Macintosh, Windows 3.1, Windows 95 & 98, Windows NT 3.5.1 or later, Linux, and Solaris, and it works with both major browsers (Netscape 2 or later or Internet Explorer 3 or later).
The Flash Web Player comes pre-installed in many systems. If you have any of the following applications installed on your computer, you probably already have everything you need to get started:
Microsoft Windows 98
Internet Explorer 4 or 5
Netscape Navigator 4.0.6 or above
AOL 4.0
RealPlayer G2
Prodigy
If you don't have the plug-in installed, you can download it directly from the Macromedia website. The file usually takes one to two minutes (at most) to download and installs easily with little effort. As of this writing, the plug-in has been downloaded over 100 million times. Macromedia estimates that over 76% of those who use the Web have installed the Flash Player.
Once you have the Flash player installed, try visiting some of these 'Flash' technology showcases:
International Olympic Committee
This page loads extremely quickly and demonstrates some nice photo animation.
Smashing Ideas Animation
This site sports some pretty cool cartoons and online games!
Star Trek Online
Beam over to this cool, totally comprehensive online experience.
Volkswagen's New Beetle Site
Check out Volkswagen's groovy European site.
ShockRave FlashCards
Quick-loading, free animated greeting cards that you can send to your friends and relatives.
Shocked Site of the Day
Macromedia's daily profile of the most entertaining and informative Flash sites on the Web.
If you have a website and would like to experiment with Flash, Macromedia is currently offering free 30-day trials of Flash 3, the authoring system used by pro Flash animators (and those who wish to emulate them). With Flash 3, you can easily mix sound, movement, and interactivity using a powerful what you see and hear is what you get interface.
Flash 3 is fairly easy to learn, and retails for just under $300. You can find out more about this product at the Macromedia site.
With Macromedia establishing business partnerships with Microsoft and Netscape, it appears as if they're here to stay. More people can view Flash pages than Java applets or other competing technologies, and hundreds of corporations are already rolling out sites loaded with eye-popping Flash images. If you don't have the Flash Web Player installed on your computer, you're really missing out!
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Get Flashy by Robert Viers