When PenPoint failed in the marketplace, SmartSketch was ported to Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. With the Internet becoming more popular, SmartSketch was re-released as FutureSplash, a vector-based Web animation in competition with Macromedia Shockwave. In 1995, SmartSketch was further modified with frame-by-frame animation features and re-released as FutureSplash Animator on multiple platforms. The product was offered to Adobe and used by Microsoft in its early work with the Internet (MSN). In 1996, FutureSplash was acquired by Macromedia and released as Flash, contracting "Future" and "Splash".

Recent developments

Adobe Flash Professional CS5

At Adobe MAX 2009 Adobe announced a beta of Adobe® Flash® Professional CS5 including a Packager for iPhone would be made available on Adobe Labs. Adobe has changed plans regarding this beta and no longer releasing a public beta of Flash Professional CS5. This change of plan was made in order to ensure the earliest possible delivery of the final software to the large number of designers and developers interested in Flash Professional CS5 and the included Packager for iPhone.

What’s coming in Flash Professional CS5

Some of the new features include:

• Packager for iPhone — Publish ActionScript 3® projects in Adobe Flash Professional to run as applications for iPhone.
• New text capabilities via the Text Layout Framework (TLF) — Get unprecedented text control and creativity with projects created in Flash. Advanced styling and layout, including right to left text, columns, and threaded text blocks, let you work with text in Flash like never before.
• XML based FLA files — Manage and modify project assets using source control systems and enable teams to easily collaborate on files.
• Code Snippets panel — Choose prebuilt code that can be injected into projects to increase interactivity and also reduce the ActionScript 3 learning curve.
• Flash Builder™ integration — Use Adobe Flash Builder software as your ActionScript editor within projects in Flash.
• Improved ActionScript editor — Improve productivity with custom class code hinting and completion.

Open Screen Project

On May 1, 2008 Adobe announced Open Screen Project, which hopes to provide 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 format, 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.

As of February 2009, the specifications removing the restrictions on the use of SWF and FLV/F4V specs have been published. The Flash Cast protocol—now known as the Mobile Content Delivery Protocol—and AMF protocols have also been made available,  with AMF available as an open source implementation, BlazeDS. Work on the device porting layers is in the early stages. Adobe intends to remove the licensing fees for Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices at their release for the Open Screen Project.

The list of mobile device providers who have joined the project includes Palm, Motorola and Nokia,  who, together with Adobe, have announced a $10 million Open Screen Project fund.

Format

Flash files are in the SWF format, traditionally called "ShockWave Flash" movies, "Flash movies," or "Flash games", 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 smaller — and thus for streams to use less bandwidth — than 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.
In addition to a vector-rendering engine, the Flash Player includes a virtual machine called the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM) for scripting interactivity at run-time, support for 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 support for JPEG, Progressive JPEG, PNG, and GIF. In the next version, Flash is slated to use a just-in-time compiler for the ActionScript engine.

Flash Player is a browser plugin, and cannot run within a usual e-mail client, such as Outlook. Instead, a link must open a browser window. A Gmail labs feature allows playback of YouTube videos linked in emails.

Flash Video

Until the advent of HTML5, getting browsers to display video was a platform specific issue, due to lack of a web standard for video and a common video format. Using Flash to embed the video led to a wide distribution of the Adobe Flash Player since it was freely offered to users across all platforms , however this technology has recently been criticized by Apple for not being suitable on Apple platforms

Flash Audio

Flash Audio is most commonly encoded in MP3 or AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) however it does also support ADPCM, Nellymoser (Nellymoser Asao Codec) and Speex audio codecs. Flash allows sample rates of 11,22,44.1 kHz. It does not support 48 kHz audio sample rate which is the standard Tv, DVD sample rate.

On August 20, 2007, Adobe announced on its blog that with Update 3 of Flash Player 9, Flash Video will also support some parts of the MPEG-4 international standards.  Specifically, Flash Player will have support for 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 support for the 'ilst' atom which is the ID3 equivalent iTunes uses to store metadata. MPEG-4 Part 2 and H.263 will not be supported in F4V file format. Adobe also announced that they 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 supporting some parts of MPEG-4 standards had become available in Fall 2007.

Installed user base

Flash as a format has become widespread on the desktop market; one estimate is that 95% of PCs have it,  while Adobe claims that 98 percent of U.S. Web users and 99.3 percent of all Internet desktop users have installed the Flash Player,  with 92 to 95% (depending on region) having the latest version.  Numbers vary depending on the detection scheme and research demographics.

The Adobe Flash Player exists for a variety of systems and devices: Windows, Mac OS 9/X, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, Pocket PC/Windows CE, OS/2, QNX, Symbian, Palm OS, BeOS, and IRIX, although the performance is typically best on Windows (see Performance). For compatibility with devices (embedded systems), see Macromedia Flash Lite.

Among mobile devices, Flash has less penetration because Apple does not bundle or allow third-party runtimes on its iPhone, which accounts for more than 60% of global smartphone web traffic, or the iPod touch, which makes up more than 95% of "mobile Internet device" traffic. This hurts Adobe's ability to market Flash as a ubiquitous mobile platform. However, Flash support has been announced for competing mobile platforms, including the next version of Android.

64-bit support

Adobe provides an experimental 64-bit build of Flash Player 10. It is only for Linux, and only for x86-64 processors.[21][22] The first release of a 64-bit Adobe Flash Player was on November 11, 2008.

Adobe decided to support 64-bit Linux due to numerous requests[21]. Although it is possible to run 32-bit browser plugins in a 32-bit browser on a 64-bit system, alternatively by using an intermediate layer between browser and plugin (such as nspluginwrapper), the solution was impractical for users.  Adobe expects final 64-bit support for Windows, Macintosh and Linux in an upcoming major release of Adobe Flash Player.  The official 32-bit player is still distributed in 64-bit Linux distributions e.g. Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, of which some users have reported problems with the 32-bit player on some websites.  Affected users can install the 64-bit player manually.

Open source implementations (at least Gnash and Swfdec), see Playback, support 64-bit architectures just as well as 32-bit.

Flash blocking in web browsers

Some web browsers default to not play Flash content before the user clicks on it, e.g. Konqueror, K-Meleon. Equivalent "Flash blocker" extensions also exist for many popular browsers: Firefox has NoScript and Flashblock, Opera has an extension also called Flashblock. Using Opera Turbo requires user clicks to play flash content. Internet Explorer has Foxie, which contains a number of features, one of them also named Flashblock. WebKit-based browsers under Mac OS X have ClickToFlash.

Programming language
Further information: ActionScript

Sources:

• www.wikipedia.org
• www.labs.adobe.com