FutureWave The precursor to Flash was SmartSketch, a product published by
FutureWave Software in 1993. The company was founded by
Charlie Jackson,
Jonathan Gay, and Michelle Alsip-Welsh. SmartSketch was a vector drawing application for pen computers running the
PenPoint OS. When PenPoint failed in the marketplace, SmartSketch was ported to
Microsoft Windows and
Mac OS. As the Internet became more popular, FutureWave realized the potential for a vector-based web animation tool that might challenge
Macromedia Shockwave technology. FutureWave approached
Adobe Systems with an offer to sell them FutureSplash in 1995, but Adobe turned down the offer at that time. FutureSplash was acquired by Macromedia, and Macromedia re-branded and released
FutureSplash Animator as
Macromedia Flash 1.0. Flash was a two-part system, a graphics and animation editor known as Macromedia Flash, and a player known as Macromedia Flash Player.
FutureSplash Animator was an animation tool originally developed for pen-based computing devices. Due to the small size of the
FutureSplash Viewer, it was particularly suited for download on the Web. Macromedia distributed Flash Player as a free browser
plugin to quickly gain market share. By 2005, more computers worldwide had Flash Player installed than any other Web media format, including
Java,
QuickTime,
RealNetworks, and
Windows Media Player. Macromedia upgraded the Flash system between 1996 and 1999, adding MovieClips, Actions (the precursor to ActionScript), Alpha transparency, and other features. As Flash matured, Macromedia's focus shifted from marketing it as a graphics and media tool to promoting it as a
Web application platform, adding scripting and data access capabilities to the player while attempting to retain its small footprint. In 2000, the first major version of ActionScript was developed and released with
Flash 5. ActionScript 2.0 was released with
Flash MX 2004 and supported
object-oriented programming, improved UI components, and other programming features. The last version of Flash released by Macromedia was
Flash 8, which focused on graphical upgrades such as filters (blur, drop shadow, etc.), blend modes (similar to
Adobe Photoshop), and advanced features for
FLV video.
Adobe On December 3, 2005, Adobe Systems acquired Macromedia alongside its product line which included Flash,
Dreamweaver,
Director/
Shockwave,
Fireworks, and
Authorware. In 2007, Adobe's first version release was
Adobe Flash CS3 Professional, the ninth major version of Flash. It introduced the ActionScript 3.0 programming language, which supported modern programming practices and enabled business applications to be developed with Flash.
Adobe Flex Builder (built on
Eclipse) targeted the enterprise
application development market, and was also released the same year. Flex Builder included the Flex SDK, a set of components that included charting, advanced UI, and data services (
Flex Data Services). In 2008, Adobe released the tenth version of Flash,
Adobe Flash CS4. Flash 10 improved animation capabilities within the Flash Editor, adding a motion editor panel. (similar to
Adobe After Effects),
inverse kinematics (bones), basic 3D object animation, object-based animation, and other text and graphics features.
Flash Player 10 included an in-built 3D engine (without GPU acceleration) that allowed basic object transformations in 3D space (position, rotation, scaling). Also in 2008, Adobe released the first version of Adobe Integrated Runtime (later re-branded as
Adobe AIR), a runtime engine that replaced Flash Player, and provided additional capabilities to the ActionScript 3.0 language to build desktop and mobile applications. With AIR, developers could access the file system (the user's files and folders), and connected devices such as a joystick, gamepad, and sensors for the first time. In 2011,
Adobe Flash Player 11 was released, and with it the first version of
Stage3D, allowing GPU-accelerated 3D rendering for Flash applications and games on desktop platforms such as
Microsoft Windows and
Mac OS X. Adobe further improved 3D capabilities from 2011 to 2013, adding support for 3D rendering on Android and iOS platforms, alpha-channels, compressed textures,
texture atlases, and other features. Adobe AIR was upgraded to support 64-bit computers, and to allow developers to add additional functionality to the AIR runtime using
AIR Native Extensions (ANE). In May 2014, Adobe announced that Adobe AIR was used in over 100,000 unique applications and had over 1 billion installations logged worldwide. Adobe AIR was voted the
Best Mobile Application Development product at the
Consumer Electronics Show on two consecutive years (CES 2014 and CES 2015). In 2016, Adobe renamed Flash Professional, the primary authoring software for Flash content, to
Adobe Animate to reflect its growing use for authoring HTML5 content in favor of Flash content.
Open Source Adobe has taken steps to reduce or eliminate Flash licensing costs. For instance, the
SWF file format documentation is provided free of charge after they relaxed the requirement of accepting a
non-disclosure agreement to view it in 2008. Adobe also created the Open Screen Project, which removes licensing fees and opens data protocols for Flash. Adobe has also open-sourced many components relating to Flash. • In 2006, the
ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2) which implements
ActionScript 3 was donated as open-source to
Mozilla Foundation, to begin work on the
Tamarin virtual machine that would implement the
ECMAScript 4 language standard with the help of the
Mozilla community. It was released under the terms of a
MPL/
GPL/
LGPL tri-license and includes the specification for the ActionScript
bytecode format;
Tamarin Project jointly managed by Mozilla and Adobe Systems It is now considered obsolete by Mozilla. • In 2011, the
Adobe Flex Framework was donated as open-source to the
Apache Software Foundation and rebranded as Apache Flex. Some saw this move as Adobe abandoning Flex, and stepping away from the Flash Platform as a whole. Sources from Apache say that "Enterprise application development is no longer a focus at Adobe. At least as Flash is concerned, Adobe is concentrating on games and video.", and they conclude that "Flex Innovation is Exploding!". The project was formerly termed "Alchemy" and "Flash Runtime C++ Compiler", and targeted the game development market to enable C++ video games to run in Adobe Flash Player. Adobe has not been willing to make complete source code of the Flash Player available for
free software development and even though
free and open source alternatives such as
Shumway and
Gnash have been built, they are no longer under active development.
Open Screen Project On May 1, 2008, Adobe announced the
Open Screen Project, with the intent of providing a consistent application interface across devices such as personal computers,
mobile devices, and
consumer electronics. When the project was announced, seven goals were outlined: the abolition of licensing fees for Adobe Flash Player and
Adobe AIR, the removal of restrictions on the use of the
Shockwave Flash (
SWF) and Flash Video (FLV)
file formats, 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. with AMF available as an open source implementation,
BlazeDS. 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.
End of life One of Flash's primary uses on the Internet when it was first released was for building fully immersive, interactive websites. These were typically highly creative site designs that provided more flexibility over what the current HTML standards could provide, as well as operate over dial-up connections. However, these sites limited accessibility by "breaking the
Back Button", dumping visitors out of the Flash experience entirely by returning them to whatever page they had been on before first arriving at the site. Fully Flash-run sites fell out of favor for more strategic use of Flash plugins for video and other interactive features among standard HTML conventions, corresponding with the availability of HTML features like
cascading style-sheets in the mid-00's. At the same time, this also led to Flash being used for new apps, including video games and animations. Precursors to
YouTube featuring user-generated Flash animations and games such as
Newgrounds became popular destinations, further helping to spread the use of Flash. Adobe created the Adobe AIR environment as a means to appease Apple's concerns, and spent time legally fighting Apple over terms of its App Store to allow AIR to be used on iOS. While Adobe eventually won, allowing for other third-party development environments to get access to the iOS, Apple's decision to block Flash itself was considered the "death blow" to the Flash application. In 2011, Adobe ended support for Flash on Android. In 2015, Adobe rebranded Flash Professional, the main Flash authoring environment, as
Adobe Animate to emphasize its expanded support for HTML5 authoring, and stated that it would "encourage content creators to build with new web standards" rather than use Flash. In July 2017, Adobe
deprecated Flash, and announced its
End-Of-Life (EOL) at the end of 2020, and will cease support, distribution, and security updates for Flash Player. In January 2021, Microsoft released an optional update KB4577586 which removes Flash Player from Windows; in July 2021 this update was pushed out as a security update and applied automatically to all remaining systems.
Post EOL support Adobe Flash will still be supported in China and worldwide on some specialized enterprise platforms beyond 2020.
Content preservation projects As early as 2014, around the same time that Adobe began encouraging Flash developers to transition their works to HTML5 standards, others began efforts to
preserve existing Flash content through emulation of Flash in open standards. While some Flash applications were utilitarian, several applications were experimental art, while others had laid the foundation of
independent video game development. An early project was
Mozilla's
Shumway, an open source project that attempted to emulate the Flash standard in HTML5, but the project was shuttered as the team found that more developers were switching to HTML5 than seeking to keep their content in Flash, coupled with the difficulties in assuring full compatibility. Google had developed the
Swiffy application, released in 2014, to convert Flash applications to HTML5-compatible scripts for viewing on mobile devices, but it was shut down in 2016. Closer to Flash's EOL date in 2020, there were more concentrated efforts simply to preserve existing Flash applications, including websites, video games, and animations beyond Flash's EOL. In November 2020, the
Internet Archive integrated
Ruffle within its Emularity system to emulate Flash games and animations without the security holes, opening a new collection for creators and users to save and preserve Flash content. By October 2023, the
Flashpoint Archive had collected more than 160,000 Flash applications, excluding those that were commercial products, and offered as a freely available archive for users to download.
Kongregate, one of the larger sites that offered Flash games, has been working with the
Strong Museum of Play to preserve its games. ==Format==