2013-14

SUBMITTED BYABHINAV MUKERJI 8B

 Adobe Flash (formerly called "Macromedia Flash") is

a multimedia and software platform used for authoring of vector graphics, animation, games and rich Internet applications (RIAs) that can be viewed, played and executed in Adobe Flash Player. Flash is frequently used to add streamed video or audio players, advertisement and interactive multimedia content to web pages, although usage of Flash on websites is declining. Flash manipulates vector and raster graphics to provide animation of text, drawings, and still images. It allows bidirectional streaming of audio and video, and it can capture user input via mouse, keyboard, microphone and camera.
Flash applications and animations can be programmed using

the object-oriented language called Action Script.

 Adobe Flash Professional is the most popular and user-friendly

authoring tool for creating the Flash content, which also allows automation via the JavaScript Flash language (JSFL). Adobe Flash Player makes the Flash content accessible on various computer systems and devices and is available free of charge for common web browsers (as a plug-in) under a few of the major operating systems, some smart phones and tablets, and a few other electronic devices using Flash Lite.

 Flash originated with the application Smart Sketch, developed

by Jonathan Gay. It was published by Future Wave Software, which was founded by Charlie Jackson. Smart Sketch was a drawing application for pen computers running the Pen Point OS. When Pen Point failed in the marketplace, Smart Sketch was ported to Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. As the Internet became more popular, Future Wave added cell animation editing to the vector drawing capabilities of Smart Sketch and released Future Splash Animator on multiple platforms. Future Wave approached Adobe Systems with an offer to sell them Future Splash in 1995, but Adobe turned them down at that time. Future Splash was used by Microsoft in its early work with the Internet (MSN), and also by Disney Online for their subscription-based service, Disney's Daily Blast. In 1996, Future Splash was acquired by Macromedia and released as Flash, contracting "Future" and "Splash". Flash is currently developed and distributed by Adobe Systems, as the result of their 2005 purchase of Macromedia.

 On May 1, 2008, Adobe announced the

the intent of providing a consistent application interface across devices such as personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics. When the project was announced, several goals were outlined: the abolition of licensing fees for Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Integrated Runtime, the removal of restrictions on the use of the Shockwave Flash (SWF) and Flash Video (FLV) file formats, the publishing of application programming interfaces for porting Flash to new devices, and the publishing of The Flash Cast protocol and Action Message Format (AMF), which let Flash applications receive information from remote databases.

Open Screen Project, with

 Flash Player for smart phones was made available to handset

manufacturers at the end of 2009. Adobe stops supporting Flash Player for mobile device browsers after the release of 11.1. It continues to support deploying Flash based content as mobile applications via Adobe AIR.

 In November 2011 there were a number of announcements that

demonstrated a possible decline in demand for rich Internet application architectures, and Flash in particular. mobile platforms or TV, instead focusing on HTML5 for browser content and Adobe AIR for the various mobile application stores. Pundits questioned its continued relevance even on the desktop and described it as "the beginning of the end". RIM announced that it would continue to develop Flash for the PlayBook. available NPAPI browser plugin for Linux, although technically just an API change, is notable in this context because availability of new Flash Players on Linux will be restricted to one browser.

Furthermore, in November 2011 Adobe announced the end of Flash for

Adobe Flash Player's planned discontinuation as a separately

 Adobe Flash continues to be a favored animation program for low-

cost 2D television and commercial animation, in competition withToon Boom Animation. Notable users of the software include DHX Media Vancouver for productions including Pound Puppies and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Nelvana for 6teen and Clone High, Williams Street for Metalocalypse and Squidbillies, andNickelodeon Animation Studios for Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera, Danny Phantom and Happy Tree Friends. Flash is less commonly used for feature-length animated films; however, 2009's The Secret of Kells, an Irish film, was animated primarily in Adobe Flash, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 82nd Academy Awards.

 Flash files are in the

"ShockWave Flash" movies, "Flash movies", or "Flash applications", usually have a .swf file extension, and may be used in the form of a web page plug-in, strictly "played" in a standalone Flash Player, or incorporated into a self-executing Projector movie (with the .exe extension in Microsoft Windows). Flash Video files have a .flv file extension and are either used from within .swf files or played through a flv-aware player, such as VLC, or QuickTime and Windows Media Player with external codecs added. The use of vector graphics combined with program code allows Flash files to be smallerand thus allows streams to use less bandwidththan the corresponding bitmaps or video clips. For content in a single format (such as just text, video, or audio), other alternatives may provide better performance and consume less CPU power than the corresponding Flash movie, for example when using transparency or making large screen updates such as photographic or text fades.

SWF format, traditionally called

 In addition to a vector-rendering engine, the Flash Player

includes a virtual machine called the Action Script Virtual Machine (AVM) for scripting interactivity at run-time, with video, MP3-based audio, and bitmap graphics. As of Flash Player 8, it offers two video codecs:On2 Technologies VP6 and Sorenson Spark, and run-time JPEG, Progressive JPEG, PNG, and GIF capability. In the next version, Flash is slated to use a just-in-time compiler for the Action Script engine. Flash Player is a browser plugin, and cannot run within traditional e-mail clients, such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird. Instead, a link must open a browser window.

 Virtually all browser plugins for video are

platform, including Adobe's offering of Flash Video, which was first introduced with Flash version 6. Flash Video has been a popular choice for websites due to the large installed user base and programmability of Flash. In 2010, Apple publicly criticized Adobe Flash, including its implementation of video playback for not taking advantage of hardware acceleration, one reason Flash is not to be found on Apple's mobile devices. Soon after Apple's criticism, Adobe demoed and released a beta version of Flash 10.1, which takes advantage of GPU hardware acceleration even on a Mac. Flash 10.2 beta, released December 2010, adds hardware acceleration for the whole video rendering pipeline.

free of charge and cross-

 Flash Audio is most commonly encoded in MP3 or AAC (Advanced

Audio Coding) however it can also use ADPCM, Nellymoser (Nellymoser Asao Codec) and Speex audio codecs. Flash allows sample rates of 11, 22 and 44.1 kHz. It cannot have 48 kHz audio sample rate, which is the standard TV and DVD sample rate. On August 20, 2007, Adobe announced on its blog that with Update 3 of Flash Player 9, Flash Video will also implement some parts of the MPEG-4 international standards. Specifically, Flash Player will work with video compressed in H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10), audio compressed using AAC (MPEG-4 Part 3), the F4V, MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14), M4V, M4A, 3GP and MOV multimedia container formats,3GPP Timed Text specification (MPEG-4 Part 17), which is a standardized subtitle format and partial parsing capability for the 'ilst' atom, which is the ID3 equivalent iTunes uses to store metadata. MPEG-4 Part 2 and H.263 will not work in F4V file format.

 Adobe also announced that it will be gradually moving away

from the FLV format to the standard ISO base media file format (MPEG-4 Part 12) owing to functional limits with the FLV structure when streaming H.264. The final release of the Flash Player implementing some parts of MPEG-4 standards had become available in Fall 2007. Adobe Flash Player 10.1 does not have acoustic echo cancellation, unlike the VoIP offerings of Skype and Google Voice, making this and earlier versions of Flash less suitable for group calling or meetings. Flash Player 10.3 Beta incorporates acoustic echo cancellation. Adobe previously announced that version 11 of Adobe Flash Player would work with the new royalty-free container, WebM, but for yet unclarified reasons Adobe Flash Player 11 does not have WebM capability.

 The reliance on Adobe for decoding Flash makes its use on

the World Wide Web a concern for advocates of open standards and free software the completeness of its public specifications are debated, and no complete implementation of Flash is publicly available insource code form with a license that permits reuse. Generally, public specifications are what makes a format re-implementable (see future proofing data storage), and reusable codebases can be ported to new platforms without the endorsement of the format creator. Adobe's restrictions on the use of the SWF/FLV specifications were lifted in February 2009 (see Adobe's Open Screen Project). However, despite efforts of projects like Gnash, Swfdec and Lightspark, a complete free Flash player is yet to be seen, as of September 2011. For example, Gnash cannot use SWF v10 yet. Notably, Gnash has been a long standing high priority project of the Free Software Foundation, since at least 2007 and it was ranked number one in September 2011.

 Notable advocates of free software, open standards, and the World

Wide Web have warned against the use of Flash: Founder of Mozilla Europe, Tristan Nitot stated in 2008: "Companies building websites should beware of proprietary rich-media technologies like Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight. (...) You're producing content for your users and there's someone in the middle deciding whether users should see your content." Representing open standards, inventor of CSS and co-author of HTML5, Hkon Wium Lie explained in a Google tech talk of 2007, entitled "the <video> element", the proposal of Theora as the format for HTML5 video:"I believe very strongly, that we need to agree on some kind of baseline video format if [the video element] is going to succeed. Flash is today the baseline format on the web. The problem with Flash is that it's not an open standard."Representing the free software movement, Richard Stallman stated in a speech in 2004 that:"The use of Flash in websites is a major problem for our community.

 Timeline
The timeline represents a simple mode of visualization that

controls and show all the elements of your animation over time. It uses two parts-Frames and Layers to organize the work. In timeline, playhead tells about the frames that is currently displayed on the stage.In short, the timeline represents the succession of frames in the time. The flash movie will be only the frames that appear on the timeline one after another in the order established by the same timeline.

 The stage has a very important properties. Due to the fact that

they coincide with document properties, in order to access them, right-click on anywhere on the stage with no objects and then on document properties. Here, we can create animation, graphics, make changes and delete our work. They fix the size of the movie.the smallest size is of 1X1 pixel and the biggest one is of 2880 X 2880 pixel. The colour selected in the colour background will be the one of the entire movie.

 Frame view is a drop down menu that controls the appearance of

the timeline. They are limited by vertical lines. While the number of frames allow us to know the assigned number of each frame, its duration, and when it will appear in the movie.

 Like any other software, Flash has its own sets of tools, which are very

important to understand before we can use them. The tool bar is divided into 4 sections-

tool section contains drawing tool, painting and selections tools. The view section contains tools for zooming in the application window The colour section contains modifies for stroke and fills colour. The option section display modifiers for the selected tool that effect
The

the editing operation of that tool.

 Arrow Tool-The arrow tool lets you select entire

objects by clicking an object.

Subselection Tool It is used to select more than

one items.

 The Line Tool-The line tool is used in much the

same way as we use a real pencil .

Lasso Tool-It is used for selecting irregular

areas.

 Pen Tool-The purpose of the pen tool is to allow

you to draw precise paths as straight lines or smooth.

Text Tool-It is used to place text blocks on the

stage.

 Oval Tool-The oval tool is used to make circular

objects.

Rectangle Tool-It is used to make rectangular

objects.

 Pencil Tool-It is used as much as the same way as

we use a real pencil.

Brush Tool-It draws brush like strokes if you are

painting.

 Paint Bucket Tool-It fills enclosed areas with

colour.

Erase Tool-It works similar to a classic eraser.

 Hand Tool-This tool lets us move the screen in the

direction we want to move the screen.

Magnifier Tool-This tool is similar to various zoom

tool you see in other programs. It has two options- Zoom in and Zoom out.

 The panels are command sets grouped according

to their function. Its mission is to simplify and facilitate the command use.