Introduction

FlashUniversity is the perfect site to learn Adobe or Macromedia Flash the easy way. Flash has become a popular and preferred tool for creating Animation, Advertisements, Web Page components, and Rich Internet Applications (RIA). This site's target audience is every people interested in developing flash applications from beginners to experts. Tutorial navigation is through green highlighted Links at the bottom of each post. If you wish to choose specific topics to study, click one of the links of blog posts at the right panel.

Here are some historical facts of how flash came to evolve into what it is today. It all started with the Jonathan Gay who was the brainchild of flash. In January 1993, Gay with Charlie Jackson and Michelle Welsh started the FutureWave Software Company with their first software SmartSketch which was used as a drawing tool to create computer graphics as easy as you would draw on paper. Soon they modified the software by adding basic frame-by-frame feature for creating animation and re-released it as the FutureSplash Animator. It was then released as Flash after Macromedia acquired the vector-based animation software in December 1996. Flash is the term used as a resultant of combining the words Future and Splash of the FutureWave's Software name. Adobe Systems bought Macromedia Corporation and all of its product portfolio in December 3, 2005.

The versions of flash that followed FutureSplash Animator include Macromedia Flash 1,2,3,4, & 5, MX (v6), MX 2004 & Professional 2004 (v7), Basic 8 & Professional 8 (v8), and Adobe Flash CS3 Professional (v9). The latest release from Adobe Systems is Adobe Flash CS4 (v10) where you can do basic 3D object manipulation with 2 new tools. I've tried this feature and it is really amazing that flash finally supports 3D animation. The frustrating thing though that alot of people (including myself) are complaining about is the really sluggish user interface of version 10. Personally i do not like the looks of CS4 either. I'm sticking with CS3, where you can still do 3D. I'll discuss that later. These are the basic history i can share with you. Click Flash Files Association to continue to learn about the basic flash file types you will deal with in flash.

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