Academic Lozbo

I’ve been working for some weeks in a multimedia Flash project, and I’ve been gathering a lot of information, so I will be posting it here as time allows me to do so. I’ll start with a small article, a brief history of the popular multimedia/animation software.

An animation software called FutureSplash Animator was released in May 1996, developed by FutureWave Software, a small software company based in San Diego, California (US). Later that year, on December, Macromedia acquired the software and rebranded it as Flash (contracting the former name, “Future” and “Splash”).

So there was not a Flash 1.0 as such, as it was released in 1997 as Flash 2, which was the first version with scripting support, although at this point this was referred to only as “actions”. Timeline control actions included were: gotoAndPlay, gotoAndStop, nextFrame and nextScene. ActionScript 1.0 was introduced in Flash 5, in September 2000.

Flash continued to evolve through several versions until they reached their 8th version in 2005, under the suite called Macromedia Studio 8, which among Flash, featured Fireworks and Dreamweaver, which by then had become the industry standards for Web Development.

In December 2005, Adobe Systems acquired Macromedia, along with all their products, but it was not until 2007, when Adobe released the rebranded Flash inside their popular Creative Suite series, (CS for short), being the third the latest version. One notable remark is the introduction of ActionScript 3.0, which featured a fundamental restructuring of the language, mainly aimed at coders. Designers and animators still feel AS3.0 has been a step back, as the uncomplicated code they used to write for simple applications or slideshows no longer works as expected.

Adobe has set September 23rd 2008, as the announce date for the upcoming Creative Suite 4 (this is not the release date of the software itself, rather the day when they will state a date for release). Public betas for Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth exists, but for Flash CS4 there’s only a private beta currently undergoing. Notable enhancements include: inverse kinematics support, keyframes no longer necessary for tweens or motion and 3d rotation.