Presentations with Macromedia Flash MX Peter Wild University of Salzburg Department of Scientific Computing Jakob Haringer Str. 2, A-5020 Salzburg, AUSTRIA [email protected]

Abstract This paper describes the usability of the vector-based animation program Macromedia Flash for presentations. After short overviews of common presentation techniques, advantages and disadvantages, useful features of Flash are described in detail. The function and performance of Flash for interactive e-learning applications is then presented, demonstrating the advantage of rich client technology Macromedia Flash. The paper then introduces examples of Flash presentations and concludes with the description of future development strategies of Macromedia.

1. Introduction Presentation of data and ideas is fundamental to research. The manner in which the materials are communicated to an audience can mark the difference between success and failure. Oral presentations are often accompanied by visual aids, charts or graphics in order to help to transport the content. Since presentations using both, textual and pictorial information, are more efficient compared to presentations with just textual information, lecturers have searched media that combine these two elements. The need to prepare visual media is another necessity. However, the use of handouts to support presentations brings many disadvantages, like detraction of the audience’s attention, costs for replication and additional presentation time for the introduction of the paper. Using transparencies for displaying charts and graphs seems to be more efficient. Projectors are widely available and for this reason still in use in many presentations. But also this means of presentation has its limitations, especially with graphics facilities. Today video-beamer and PC provide the most efficient presentations. Special development tools have been invented to assist people creating textual and pictorial content for their presentations. Among the most promising presentation graph-

ics applications are PowerPoint, created by Microsoft, or StarOffice. Using these software packages it is generally possible to create slides with texts and graphics very quickly. Their strength is the creation of structured slides, the possibility to import external graphical data and simple embedded tools for drawing and animation functions. So far these software products have proven successful. However, they have also suffered from significant drawbacks and limitations, especially in the area of visualizing processes of a certain complexity in time and motion. These animations can only be embedded as sequences, but have to be created with other applications. The rapid growth of the Internet and the WWW enables lecturers to show their slides online and to allow interested listeners to download content provided by the lecturer. Generally, the ability to deliver not only very small client based HTML-content, but also more powerful dynamic content to users, has forced companies to look for better models for Internet applications - models that combine the media-rich power of the traditional desktop with the deployment and content-rich nature of web applications. Companies are also anticipating a growth in the use of web services, or reusable software components that are used as services over the network, and are expecting a world, where applications will need to share functionality and data across many types of client devices. This trend is driving the industry to develop new powerful software applications. This is the backdrop upon which Macromedia built Macromedia Flash MX and Macromedia Flash Player 6. Multimedia presentation via the Internet using Macromedia Flash is potentially used in both, research and education. For example, [7] outline experiences with a variety of commercial and free software tools including Macromedia Flash, which they have used to prepare protein documentaries and other multimedia presentations relevant to molecular biology. Another example where Macromedia Flash has potential, as [6] points out, is e-learning. Flash can access online content, for example, via the ActionScript LoadVariables()

function, which is able to access URL-encoded data, provided by a server-side ASP-file connection to a databases, as [9] points out. In [4] J. Kemeny and B. Zeitler describe the successful implementation of Flash animations in one of their distance-learning geo-engineering courses. The goal of this paper is not to present any new scientific results, but the description of how to create flash presentations, it points out advantages and disadvantages compared to office applications like PowerPoint and finally gives examples of Flash animations including interactive e-learning applications. A brief introduction of the program will be given in Section 2. Section 3 describes several advantages of Macromedia Flash including the presentation of a study by Macromedia about the Flash Player penetration in the WWW. How to create a Flash movie is described in Section 4. Flash basics are discussed in Section 5. In Section 6 e-learning capabilities of Flash are presented. Examples of Flash are demonstrated in Section 7, while Section 8 presents future prospects for multimedia presentation with Macromedia Flash. Section 9 forms the Conclusion.

2. What is Flash

open source tools exist for generating and parsing SWF files. The SWF specification allows third parties to extend the basic functionality of the format through the mechanism of custom SWF tags. What Macromedia keeps under wraps is the Flash FLA project file format, but that has not stopped the development of competing products like Adobe LiveMotion, which uses its own project file format. According to Jarjec Artymiak [1] the difference between Flash and the SWF Format is this: In the broadest sense, Flash is a complete solution: the authoring environment, the content delivery format, and the plug-in that plays the content back. SWF is only a small part of that solution; it’s the file format in which content created with the Flash authoring tool is distributed. Summing up, there are several components commonly lumped together under the Flash label: The SWF vector graphics file format, the application or plug-in that plays SWF content, and the authoring application.

Macromedia Flash is a powerful tool that is used to produce 2D vector animations for the Internet. Since it is vector-based and the drawings are rendered on the local computer, Macromedia Flash content downloads faster, is scalable, and boasts higher quality than other graphics formats. Unlike bitmapped images that are optimized for a single resolution, vector images can adapt to multiple resolutions. Originally called FutureSplash Animator, the history of Flash begins near the end of 1996. At that time, Flash was a drawing and animation package. With the addition of ActionScript, a powerful object-oriented programming language compliant with ECMAScript (Standard ECMA-262), the possibilities became endless. In the latest edition, Flash MX opens a whole new realm of possibilities, including video import and streaming capabilities, improved handling of sound, the ability to import MP3 and JPEG files dynamically, a scriptable drawing model, dynamic masking and font substitution. Flash content can be created with the Macromedia Flash MX authoring tool, allowing the import of artwork, the creation of morphing, motion and transparency effects, adding interactivity, sound, and animation. Flash projects are then published as a Macromedia Flash Player file with extension .SWF, optimized for web delivery. With careful planning, those applications can be designed to load very quickly, even by a slow modem connection. While SWF is not an open standard, Macromedia does make it available to the public and many commercial and

Even though it is true that most Flash movies are intended for the Web, Flash includes a feature that enables the creation of standalone Flash-based applications. By using what is known as a projector, one can publish Flash movies as executable programs. Flash as a presentation tool has become very popular, since the latest edition also offers templates that enable the user to produce sequences for presentation very quickly. The great advantage of this tool, in comparison to other presentation programs like PowerPoint is, that its interactivity tools allow much more flexibility as regards animation and interactive content.

3. Advantages of Flash 1. Flash is a powerful visual tool, offering the ability to demonstrate rather than just describe. 2. Form and motion tweening enable the visualization of processes of a certain complexity. 3. Flash incorporates the element of time to show how processes change over time. 4. Flash allows the implementation and synchronization of picture, sound and text. 5. Flash output (SWF) is easy to scale and to implement on various browser platforms.

6. Flash loads much faster than animated images. 7. Flash allows interactivity. Macromedia Flash allows to create a Web experience that is more attractive, more compelling, and compatible with more browsers than any other Web solution. Dynamic HTML, Java, and other advanced Web design formats are not reliable alternatives, since they are either not compatible or inconsistent with different browsers. Although plain text may download faster than graphics, vector graphics are very compact and a picture can be more functional, or at least more efficient than text in communicating certain content. With Macromedia Flash Player’s wide availability, Macromedia Flash sites provide both, function and design. Since Macromedia Flash is free of the limiting design capabilities of more traditional Web display options, it lets you clearly and exactly express your own ideas of a good web or presentation design. A whole new world opens up for experienced developers in terms of streaming interactive video over the web. Of course, there are other options like RealMedia, WindowsMedia or QuickTime, all providing good quality streaming video. The breakthrough provided by Flash MX is that one does not need to pay the high costs of a streaming server to deliver video content (as is the case with RealMedia and WindowsMedia), and the possibility to easily integrate the video content inside a web-page with a customized look and with lower memory requirements. Most people recognize Macromedia Flash as a webauthoring tool. Although Flash was created for the web, it can successfully be used in conjunction with PowerPoint. It offers effects that many designers and presenters want, such as better control over sound, motion and interactivity. Best of all, Flash compresses its files to a very small size while keeping the quality. Another advantage of Flash is that it can produce an executable file format. This eliminates the possibility of having to load any additional software. However, many presenters argue that multimedia animation distract the user from the content. Surely Flash does not prevent developers to produce overloaded slides full with animations that do not support the content. Sometimes it is even unnecessary to use multimedia in presentations, but there are situations, where it is useful to have multiple senses work on a problem of a certain complexity. [7] write about the description of a 3-dimensional protein structure: Reading about a specific interaction . . . is counterintuitive. So is going to the Protein Data Bank (PDB) . . . to view the interaction. Both approaches require the reader to shift focus between one conceptualization of the interaction (text) and another (graphics). Ideally, the user should be

able to view the protein molecule at the same time they are being told how structure components relate to function. High-end piece software Macromedia Flash allows to unify these different elements. What makes Flash very attractive to the ‘ordinary’ user is that they do not need to take the time to learn all of the intricacies of the software. Although it offers extreme capabilities, even simple presentations can have a stunning impression on the audience. There are also tons of websites and books specifically geared toward helping the Flash novice. And, apart from ActionScript, no programming experience is needed. Flash owes its popularity to several factors, one of them is certainly that it is very easy to give life to static pictures. In traditional, hand-drawn animation, artists draw a series of still images, each slightly different from the last, to create the illusion of motion. This means literally thousands of drawings are needed to produce, for example, a ten minute film at the standard 24 frames per second. Obviously, this is far too time-intensive for creating animations for the Web, besides which sending several images per second is impractical even over the fastest broadband internet connections available today. Thankfully, Flash offers a shortcut to animating. While it is possible (and sometimes necessary) to create frame-by-frame animation in Flash, more typically animation is done by creating Keyframes and letting Flash fill in the Frames between these Keyframes. This process is called Tweening. Another reason, why Flash can be regarded as one of the best technologies to emerge from the Internet era is the SWF file format. SWF files are compact and efficient enough to work well within the bandwidth constraints of the Internet, as Artymiak describes in [1] comparing the SWF Format and SVG. SWF can carry more data encoded using the same number of bytes than SVG. As a result, Flash has become extremely popular with designers, who have used it to create award-winning animations for entertainment, games, ads, training, and business-to-consumer Web sites. (Of course, bad designers have also used Flash to create annoying animations for introductions.) The popularity of Flash among designers and presenters is also due to its well-designed and easy to handle authoring application, a robust file format providing the features necessary to enable engaging interfaces, and a widely distributed player. Although many attempts have been made to create programs that can handle voctor graphics, Macromedia is in the lead: its convincing technology has made it very popular among the Web design community. And there is a lot, people like about Flash. One need not worry about the presentation of colors on different browsers, no different versions have to be created for differ-

ent browsers or browser generations: everything is bundled into one file that works alike on all different platforms that clients may use. And if you want to create forms or need a database connection: a powerful programming language is also at hand. With Flash anyone can create interactive applications. There is no need to learn DHTML or any other underlying technology. Flash simply lets creative people focus on the creative part of the job, without worrying about the technology that makes it all possible. And those who are disillusioned with DHTML have a new powerful tool that lets them forget all the frustration around incompatibilities between various DHTML implementations. The development tools are easy to handle. The stage, this is the screen, where you create your application, gives you a perfect overview of all objects you want to use in your document. Be it a sound modul, a still bitmap or vector images with code, everything is arranged to guarantee easy control over layout. The consistent look lets one concentrate on the creative part of the job. Web designers will also like the XML parser and best of all: Flash provides what other standards cannot provide: an easy way for the designers to control the final look of the documents they publish on the Web. It is, in a way, the PDF of the interactive multimedia. Recently the popularity of Flash has been in the focus of many studies in order to help customers whether to use Flash animations in their websites or not. In June 2002, NPD Research, the parent company of MediaMetrix, conducted a study to determine what percentage of Web browsers have Macromedia Flash preinstalled. The results can be observed at [5] and show that 97.8% of Web users can experience Macromedia Flash content without having to download and install a player. The quantitative online market research study evaluates the penetration of various online media types among a representative Internet population. The survey presents respondents with several pages, each with an in line image in a different format on each page, and asks respondents to indicate whether or not they can see each of the images. This study had been conducted via the World Wide Web, utilizing the NPD Online panel. Panelists were sent an e-mail directing them to NPD’s survey site by URL. Upon entering their member name and password, panelists gained access to the survey. Five $100 cash prizes were offered through a drawing as an incentive in this study. 2,000 participants, comprising a representative Internet sample responded to this survey. The study had been evaluated at a 95% significance confidence level, (5% risk). Former surveys also prove that even the current version of Macromedia Flash Player is preinstalled on more and more clients, as can be seen in Figure 1. Survey results indicates that Flash is sufficiently ubiquitous that Web designers know that most of their site’s visitors will be able to view Flash content.

Figure 1. Penetration of current version Flash Player 6. c Data by NPD Group, Inc.


The first major technology for nontrivial, interactive Web interfaces was, of course, Java. However, Java Applets never really caught on, because of many reasons. One of them was certainly the need to download new plug-ins because of its rapid evolution, but their size became a barrier. Macromedia has always kept the Flash player very lightweight. While users criticized Flash animations in the past for breaking some of the usability metaphors of the web, Macromedia has addressed those concerns. Today, the Flash authoring tool lets authors tag points in the animation for the browser’s history list. Flash now provides support for Accessibility. Authors can also insert URLs to support indexing and search engines. Finally, SWF players are now appearing on PDAs, cell phones, interactive TV platforms, etc. With named anchors, Macromedia Flash MX content can now be bookmarked, allowing for the use of the browser Back and Forward buttons.

4. How to create a Flash movie Flash borrows its overall structure from film. Flash movies consist of items placed on a timeline separated into frames. When played by themselves, without controlling code, Flash movies play exactly like films, one frame after another, from beginning to end. To create a Flash movie, authors insert frames and place elements onto the timeline in layers. Layers correspond to a hierarchical order, so authors can control whether elements appear above or below others. Layers do also serve as segments within a timeline, as will be discussed later in this paper. Within the timeline each element has its own timeline and can perform actions independent of the described time-

Stage

single Frame Formatting Palettes

Toolbar

Timeline

(non−empty) Keyframe Motion Tween (blue) Shape Tween (green) 

Empty Keyframe with ActionScript Figure 2. Typical Flash MX desktop arrangement

line of a Scene. A single frame can account for some Flash elements, such as basic shapes. More complex elements, called Movie Clips, have their own timelines. Movie Clips let Flash movies play child movies within a parent. Each Movie Clip plays on its own timeline, but each clip is itself controlled by its parent. Figure 2 shows the typical Flash MX desktop-arrangement with its elements: Toolbar The Toolbar allows the user to quickly choose what sort of action the cursor will perform. Stage The Stage is the area, where images are created and manipulated. Timeline The Timeline coordinates different animation states in flash film. Formatting Panels The Formatting Panels, shortcuts for changing components of an animation. Dots on frames represent keyframes on the timeline. Filled dots mean that the keyframe has something in it. Flash allows to attach scripts to movie frames so no linear authoring is necessary. Actions can send the playback head to another frame, load another Flash movie, and even send an external message to the containing application (using the FSCommand ActionScript function). Timeline events (such as exiting a frame) and user events (such as clicking a mouse button) can both invoke actions. This dual event-source facility makes Flash a non-linear timebased application medium. Further details on how to create a Flash movie can be examined in [8].

Figure 3. Symbols indicating different framestates within the timeline

5. Flash Basics Every Flash movie bases on so called symbols. A symbol -in Flash terms- can be a picture-graphic, an animated button, a sound effect or a whole film sequence. These symbols are stored in a library, which is also part of a Flash movie. By putting graphic elements in the library file size is kept small, because the library holds a single copy of the graphical element, button, or movie used in the animation. Each time that element is used in the animation, a link is created to that element in the library. Thus there is only one copy of the element (and several links to it) rather than having multiple copies of the element. The Timeline is where you indicate which images will be on the stage at a particular point in time. Thus this also indicates how long an image will be on the stage. The timeline lays out the animation. It is made up of individual frames which are like snapshots. Figure 3 shows the most important timeline-symbols. When a frame holds an image it is called a keyframe. If, for instance, a vector-object shall be moved, a keyframe is inserted at the starting point, the vector-object is added from the library, where it is already defined as a symbol, and another keyframe is added at the end of the sequence. Then start position is defined in the first keyframe and the target position is defined in the second keyframe. By defining a motion tweening Flash will calculate all necessary frames between the key frames. Tweening is an automatic process in which Flash creates the animation between different keyframes. Transparency effects can easily be created by changing the alpha property of a symbol between two keyframes. There are many sorts of changes which Tweening will manage. It is, for instance, easy to create effects, where one object changes into another one: Take the process of animal cell division. Here

again, two keyframes will hold the pictures of the different shapes of cell bodies. Form Tweening will create the necessary frames to make the changes appear smooth. Shape Tweening is unique in that it operates on non-Symbol, nongrouped graphics, and will not work otherwise. All other types of Tweens (called Motion Tweens) behave exactly the opposite. That is, Motion Tweens require either grouped objects or Symbols in order to animate properly. Flash defaults to a frame rate of 12 frames per second because of its focus on internet delivery. By reducing the number of frames by half, you will save considerable file size which is important for files that download quickly. Perhaps because of the tweening features, or the different types of animation usually done in Flash, 12 frames per second is usually adequate for most Flash movies. Animation is simply a series of single static images that have slight changes from one image to the next. By showing those images quickly in succession we get the illusion of motion. Sometimes only part of the overall image changes, so the support of different layers accelerated the process of creation. Only certain parts were drawn on sheets of acetate or plastic. By layering them on top of each other the entire picture could be achieved. This concept is utilized in Flash. Each Layer supports independent animation and allows to create different motions for the objects on the various layers. If two independent objects shall move at once, the creation of two layers with two different timelines is necessary. Then frames and tweens can be set for the objects on those lines. Each layer has a separate animation, but when put together the two animations appear to interact. To do this each animation is created separately, keyframes are added where necessary. Typically both layers will have a keyframe at the same place. For further information on how the presented animations are defined I refer to [8].

6. E-learning capabilities of Flash The Internet has gained enormous interest since the 1990ies. WWW has attracted both personal and business users throughout the world. Today the most exciting applications are ecommerce applications, informative web sites, various portals and interactive services for millions of end users. The usage of web is controversial: web has not yet been widely accepted for education but is mostly used and seen as an entertainment based environment. There are, however, big research and development projects and co-operation around Universities, publishing houses and computer companies to improve and vitalize web usage as an educational tool as well. Multimedia is changing the way engineering concepts

are communicated on the Internet. It has the ability to visualize normally abstract engineering ideas from a different perspective. Web based authoring tools like Macromedia Flash provide the client-side functionality needed for these visualizations. Flash is used to create standard animations and interactive animations. Both can be educationally advantageous. Non-interactive Animations are useful for: visualization of processes of a certain complexity, explaining processes that one might not be able to see in real life, simplifying things by showing only the salient features, omitting some of the distracting details that would be seen in real life, to accelerate or slow down processes or pointing out the most salient elements in ways one just can not do in the physical setting, allowing multiple senses work on a single problem (animated graphics in combination with text and sound). Interactive animations are additional to the advantages of animation listed above useful for: presenting content in an engaging manner, allowing students to select different information layers and combine them. Flash MX offers what Macromedia calls a rich client, a highly experiential, integrated thin-client environment for content, communications and applications. So far, Flash has provided only the ability to integrate multimedia elements into existing Web pages, but the new version radically extends Flash’s capabilities, making it possible to create an entire dynamic site in Flash, from content display to database connectivity. Flash has become so popular as a product for creating online learning applications because: 1. Flash provides the very lightweight yet high-impact vector file format SWF with all its advantages (well performing over low-bandwith connections, production of professional graphics and animations, etc.) as explained in Section 3. 2. Macromedia Flash Player supports text graphics and animation, but also streaming MP3 audio. 3. Combined with scripting capabilities of ActionScript developers can create content that delivers more compelling user experience than traditional technologies.

4. Macromedia Flash is a powerful tool for learning applications that enables the creation of sophisticated graphics and animations that are extremely valuable for illustrating facts, concepts, and procedures. 5. Finally, Macromedia Flash has become popular thanks to the ubiquity of the Macromedia Flash Player. NPD Research results show that the Flash player is now preinstalled in all major operating systems and browsers, and provides its powerful features across the broadest broad range of systems and devices. Learning developers are increasingly taking advantage of these rich capabilities and the availability of the Macromedia Flash Player to deliver online learning applications to consumers, students, partners, and employees. Interactivity and its lack has always been the major obstacle in the multimedia development. The scale of the interactivity in these products can vary from TV like presentations as in the earlier multimedia products to user-centric products like children’s learning games. Anybody will be thrilled and completely caught up with the multimedia applications if the application is able to capture the user’s undivided attention, but mostly this happens only with computer games. Drucker describes in his paper [2]: The power of e-Learning rests in its ability to deliver both the richness and reach needed to maximize the effectiveness of the learning process. Richness in presentation is provided by multimedia technologies, allowing both a live classroom experiences, as well as asynchronous modes which include audio and video. Content richness is provided by blending off-the-shelf learning materials with custom materials and internal knowledge. Equally important, richness is provided by integrating content in context, making it timely and relevant to business operations. E-Learning’s reach is provided by its flexibility, distance learning capabilities, and collaborative technologies. By being integrated into the value chain activity, eLearning delivers the most timely form of knowledge. By providing the tools by which a user can fully personalize the experience based on their skills and tasks, e-Learning creates a much more intimate and memorable (i.e. effective) learning experience compared to traditional training. Instead of teaching a course from a textbook, the webbased course content actively involves the student. This allows the student to see the capabilities of multimedia firsthand, and also how different media elements can be combined to create an interactive learning environment. But Macromedia Flash also has its limitations: Flash is a powerful development environment for creating elearning content, but it requires additional programming skills

to build efficient application structures. However, Macromedia Flash does have a collection of learning interaction Smart Clips (accessed by choosing Window CommonLibraries Learning Interactions), which simplify the process of creating common question types. Learning extensions are also available on the Macromedia Exchange, www.macromedia.com/exchange, that will assist you with creating a page-turning framework and a quiz. Macromedia Flash supports timeline-based authoring and relies on scripting to deliver interactivity, branching, and logic. Macromedia Flash also supports a broad range of rich media, but it does not provide support for digital video or true 3D graphics. Learning applications are diverse, ranging from simple text-and-graphics tutorials to sophisticated software or hardware simulations. No other product meets this broad range of project requirements equally well. For this reason, learning developers frequently use a combination of products to create their courseware. 



7. Examples The following example demonstrates the usability of Flash as a presentation tool to visualize animated processes: Title: Herpesvirus Replication. http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/faculty/wagner/movieindex.html Author: Karin Christensen [email protected]. Description: Flash animations describe the HSV, a nuclear replicating, icosahedral, enveloped DNA virus. Animations are available for Receptor Binding, HSV RNA Transcription During Productive Infection, Latent Infections, DNA Replication and Encapsidation and Release. Techniques: Emphasize is given on animation (Motion Tweening and Form tweening) to explain the processes. Only few interactive elements except navigation control. Flash is a useful tool for creating e-learning applications, as can be seen in the following example: Title: Dynamic Exercises. eschola/.

http://www.wildnet.net/-

Author: Peter Wild [email protected]. Description: An interactive Flash animations offers dynamically generated Exercises to train the English definite article to pupils attending 1st form. Techniques: Emphasize is given on interaction: An exercise contains 10 sentences which are selected by a

server-side ASP script out of an Access database and then loaded into the Flash animation. Answers are corrected within the film and results are displayed when the exercise is finished.

used to the typical handling of Flash. As the Flash player plays all content inside the browser, the great problem of deciding which platform to serve best is no worry for a Flash programmer.

8. Future development strategies

9. Conclusion

As Flash has evolved, it has adopted features from conventional development methodologies. With ECMAScript compliance and true object support, traditional application and web developers are finding Flash ActionScript increasingly accessible. Traditional developers treat it as just another tool for creating the same kinds of applications they create in other languages and environments. Interacting with Java and .NET components Flash has become much more than a simple internet application tool. Macromedia plans to make Flash a multifunctional tool. Its team is working towards a ‘next-generation’ product that targets application development as much as animation and multimedia. Macromedia has some rather significant plans in store for Flash. Russel Jones observes Macromedia’s big plans for Flash in [3] and reports Chief Technology Officer for Macromedia Jeremy Allaires thoughts. Allaire describes the challenge facing Web developers and vendors today as ‘moving from Web apps to rich apps.’ For users, he says, Web applications suffer from several shortcomings. Browsers typically recreate the user interface from scratch for each screen in the application, even when only a few screen elements change. Most Web video launches in a separate application window. Clicking on a mailto link launches a separate email application. Most people access newsgroups with a newsgroup client, because reading newsgroups from a browser is an exercise in frustration. Users ought to be able to access these functions with a single, integrated client. To make that happen, Allaire believes that developers need a better model for creating Internet applications. For a Web developer it is essential nowadays to be familiar with a wide range of internet technologies. One has to be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of client-side scripting and, of course, experienced web designers are able to produce programming code in JSP, Java and JavaScript, to name just a few. But also the server side scripting must not be forgotten: PHP and ASP are probably the currently most popular script languages. What is most tiring is the fact, that all these languages are quickly followed by new technologies: Once you are familiar with a scripting language it is already outdated and another one has taken the lead. Taken individually, these technologies are relatively easy to learn, but taken together, they make it impossible to keep up with the Web development process. In contrast to this, Flash takes just little effort to keep up with: New tools that enrich the latest edition are no problem for a user who is

Flash cannot magically enable a bad designer or a good software developer to produce elegant and functional presentations, but it is a powerful tool to create presentations and it allows designers and developers to work more autonomously, in a fashion more consistent with traditional web or desktop applications. After a short introduction to Flash basics and the description of its advantages it has been made clear that Flash offers new challenges to modern web design and professional presentation. Challenging the market Flash targets application development as much as animation and multimedia. By offering ActionScript features Flash has become an attractive tool for both, traditional web designers and professional developers of desktop applications. The capabilities of Flash have grown steadily since its inception. First, it is a very good animation player, as one can see by browsing the given examples of Flash presentations. Second, Flash is scriptable and can interact with the browser to deliver rich content types as part of the user experience. Finally, this paper has tried to give evidence that Flash even in its current form isn’t limited to simple animations. When you treat Flash in this manner, you can build fullfeatured, data-driven applications and high quality presentations. However, Flash doesn’t eliminate all problems and there are many limitations remaining to be solved. No tool can magically enable a bad designer to produce elegant, yet functional presentations. There will always be a need for experienced designers who possess good esthetic sensibilities and a solid grounding in usability. Of course, good designers are needed no matter what user interface toolkit you use.

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