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Emmy Huang, the Flash Player Product Manager at Adobe, has posted an article on her blog discussing the recently released penetration figures for Flash Player 8 and the updated survey methodology employed.
It’s great to see that the installed user base is now at a staggering 86% after a mere 9 months. The ubiquity of the plug-in will ensure that the exciting features offered by Player 8 are employed by an increasing number of web developers.
From its humble beginnings as FutureSplash, Flash has grown into the leading platform for delivery of multimedia on the web. Adobe have posted a selection of interviews with industry figures, each of whom discusses how they discovered the technology, and how they’re using it today.
The first version of Flash I encountered was the trial download of release 2 whilst working for Games Domain back in 1997. The animation capabilities of Flash instantly endeared me to the software, and I tried hard to convince my employer at the time to use it for online advertising. (Remember, this was during the dark days of gif-only advertising, when you were expected to create a compelling, uber-clickable banner in 10kb or less). Unsurprisingly, my Flash evangelism fell on deaf ears due to the low penetration rate of the plugin at the time, but within a couple of years things were very different indeed…
The internet has changed beyond recognition over the past decade, and Flash has consistently evolved and adapted to maintain its position as the most popular delivery platform for online multimedia. Greater challenges lie ahead with the proliferation of broadband, mobile/cellphone and other emerging technologies: hopefully Flash will continue to thrive in the post-Macromedia era.
Goggles is a fun flight simulator game that uses graphical data from Google Maps. A great idea from Mark Caswell-Daniels.
This website demonstrates the features of the KIA Rio using an innovative, 3D rollercoaster ride.
Featuring lots of pre-rendered Flash animation and bold, primary colours, it makes a welcome change from the image-heavy car sites we’ve grown accustomed to.
The UK website for the PSP game Loco Roco is a real treat, using the open source Flade engine to great effect.
Mochi Media have released MochiBot, an online statistics package for Flash content.
Integration with MochiBot is simple: just cut and paste 4 lines of Actionscript into your FLA, then publish the SWF file. Each time the SWF is viewed, tracking data is passed to MochiBot for processing. You can see a simple example of the MochiBot dashboard here, or for more detail see the MochiBot tour.
It remains to be seen how popular this will be, but it’s a promising offering, and the free, base-level account is certainly worth a try. Combine this with Urchin/Google Analytics and you’ll have a formidable set of tracking tools.
Colin Moock has posted a great article on the recent history of Actionscript and related Adobe/Macromedia swf generation tools. Colin discusses the progression from AS2 to AS3 since the release of Flash Player 7, moving on to the recently released Flex 2. The article concludes with helpful “next steps” for different types of users, from AS2 developers to timeline-based Actionscripters and designers.
You can read the article in full here.
Related links:
Senocular.com have posted a new tutorial, the Beginners Guide to Getting Started with AS3 (Without Learning Flex). Surely learning Flex and MXML is an integral part of AS3? Regardless, it’s an interesting article that’s worth a read.
If you’re new to AS3 you should read the Actionscript 2 to Actionscript 3 migration guide and the Flex 2/AS3 language reference.
MDM have released an update to Zinc adding support for Flash 9, Flex 2 and AS3, with the added bonus of Universal Binary support for Intel-based Macs. (Mac OSX support is via a plugin - the application runs on Windows and generates Mac binaries).
I haven’t looked at Zinc in some time, and I’m genuinely impressed with the feature set it now boasts. In particular, the appearance of database connectivity is a real boon: if it can accommodate large databases (for data-driven CD-ROMs) and the SQL support is comprehensive, then I’ll find it hard to justify using Director with the Valentina Xtra again any time soon.
