Macromedia Flash

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Macromedia Flash refers to an authoring program that creates content for the Flash Player, to which the term may refer as well. Flash Player is an application that can also be used by web browser and other applications in order to display specific content.

The content itself can be created with several tools. The most capable one is the actual Flash IDE developed by Adobe (formerly by Macromedia), but other authoring environments can also be used.

The Flash technology itself is very popular among web developers, due to its high optimization degree and maturity, allowing them to create websites with very rich multimedia content.

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The Flash technology

The Flash technology is centered around two main points. One of them is the powerful multimedia engine, allowing it to use images, sounds and animation. These are bound together by another important element: the ActionScript programming language.

ActionScript is a powerful scripting language that resembles JavaScript in its syntax. ActionScript includes a powerful set of framework libraries that allow it to use multimedia content and interact with other technologies as well.

The security it presents is quite high, but there have been some examples of specially created programs which did pose some security threats. However, only a few users have complained about this happening, and didn't taint the general opinion that Flash is a highly secure technology.

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Criticism

Despite its large-scale adoption, Macromedia Flash did receive its share of criticism. On of the more important of them is the lack of well-implemented versions outside the Windows world, which makes website content inaccessible to a significant amount of users. Some platforms are not supported at all.

The other problem is that, although it does place a significant amount of power in the designer's hands, Flash is tricky to use without overusing it. Several websites abuse Flash, providing a lot of animation and unnecessary load that make reaching for the actual information much harder.

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