Macromedia Flash is a many faceted program. While it can be used to create quality animations that download quickly, it also can be used to create whole interactive web sites. The Flash Player format of SWF is becoming a standard with more and more people having access to the free Flash Player via download from the Macromedia web site and as an integral part of web browsers such as Internet Explorer 5.5.

Flash has the ability to produce optimized and anti-aliased vector animated or static graphics. The animated graphics download faster from the web than do the more traditional forms of animation such as animated GIFs. They also retain their quality while performing better. Since Flash supports streaming, animations can start to play before they are fully downloaded. One reason that Flash files can be optimized so well is their use of symbols. A graphic element or piece of text can be converted to a symbol which resides in the symbol library. Each time that particular object is needed, it is drawn from the symbol library as an instance; thus, eliminating a lot of redundancy. Certain properties of the instance can be changed without effecting the symbol. In the graphic on the right, the highlighted line covering the word "spinner" shows that "spinner" refers to a graphic symbol because of the box shape to its left.

While Flash is vector based, it does support bitmapped files including GIF, JPEG, and PNG. It can integrate more than one file type in an animation. An author, for example, can import a file from Freehand as well as a JPEG, for example and use them together. Flash supports layering which makes keeping track of one's work as well as separating objects very easy. In addition, Flash supports motion and shape tweening. Motion tweening can comprise actual movement from one spot to another or object fading, rotation, etc. Or it can contain all of these together. Fading, for example, can be accomplished using the Alpha setting on the Effect Panel or the Brightness setting.

Flash supports audio including ADPCM or MP3 compressed AIFF and WAV audio samples.

As stated earlier, Flash can be used to drive a whole web site by creating highly interactive elements such as four state static or animated buttons and ActionScripts which control commands such as "get URL", "stop", "go to frame", etc. Button creation in Flash is a snap; and one can create very innovative buttons as well as "standard buttons."

Flash is platform independent both in its use of vector files as well as outputting fully self contained platform independent files. It also supports XML data transfer and can output HTML text.

The Flash interface is industry standard and easy to use. It contains its own complement of drawing tools including tools new to version 5 such as the Bezier Pen Tool.

Flash has many tools for previewing how an animation will stream on the web. This makes it easier to optimize an animation because one can visually see the bottlenecks and make changes so as to avoid them. I found that once I had worked with these tools on my first animation and had reworked it a few times to create better streaming, I was able to create other animations that avoided the problems I had found in the first. I began to have a feel for the best way to present the animations. Since I combine text, vector graphics and bitmapped graphics, I was able to know how to place them in relation to each other to afford the best streaming and thus decrease download times.

The following illustration shows a graph depicting how the various frames will stream. The three options selected to create this graph were: Bandwidth Profiler, Show Streaming, and Streaming Graph.

For previous users of Flash, the following are some of the features new to Flash 5:

While I bought some third party books, mainly because I was working on this project, I found the Macromedia Flash manual very good. Included in the package was a 450 page ActionScript Reference Guide. Also, the tutorials or lessons accessed via the help menu were great and gave me enough comprehension of the product to be able to start using it.

This is a spectacular product. While the learning curve is the steepest of the four products, once the concepts of Flash are understood, it is not at all hard to use and is a lot of fun because ones creativity knows no bounds.

For more information on Flash 5, go to the Macromedia web site. There are also a lot of Flash sites on the web as well as discussion forums. The retail price for the Macromedia Freehand 9/Flash 5 Studio is about $575 and the upgrade price is about $240. The price for Flash 5 is $390 while the upgrade is $140.