TABLE OF CONTENTS SmartSketch was a drawing application originally developed in the early 1990s by Jonathan Gay and his company Future Splash, which developed into an animation program for the Internet FutureSplash Animator. Future Splash was a small company with one of many multimedia plug-ins struggling for attention. It was offered for sale to Adobe who initially turned it down due to its unimpressive performance!
Although the early versions were slow and buggy, Disney started using it along with Shockwave and this attracted the attention of Macromedia. The Shockwave Flash plug-in format was then developed by Macromedia to play back small and fast vector animated content on the web. In December 1996 Flash 1 was born.
Flash is now in version 8. It has evolved into a sophisticated package for the creation of economical animation and interactive content. Due to its popularity, many other drawing and animation programs now have a Shockwave Flash export option.
To read more about the history of Flash, go to <http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/events/john_gay >.
Flash is used for the creation of graphics, animation and media that users can interact with, such as interfaces, rich media web pages, games, real-time chat applications, interactive shopping systems and video conferencing. Although the program is primarily associated with creating content for the Internet, Flash is also used to create stand-alone CD-ROMS and presentations, animation for TV, content for PDAs, interactive television, kiosks...
