by Geomon T S (Graphic Designer, Excellone Technologies)

Macromedia Flash is an increasingly popular tool for creating interactive multimedia presentations, including graphics design and illustrations. The color management and enhanced graphic tools extend the creative capabilities of Flash. This new technology makes use of vector graphics, which holds the base of this graphics animation program. The flash files that are capable of being included in a web page and played in a stand-alone player comes out of these flash animations. Action Script programming tool coming with flash, allows designers and developers to leverage their existing skills and provide a complete Internet application development environment.

Flash Features

The first feature behind the increasing popularity of FLASH is, the ease in its usage. The Flash animation is also comparably faster than the typical web graphics, as it makes use of vector graphics instead of bit-mapped graphics. This ensures that the image quality of Flash Design animation is very high. Further text quality is also nurtured by vector graphics. In Flash animation, the size of the image doesn’t matter as it works regardless of size.

Pros & Cons of Flash

Pros

• Use of vector graphics.
• Easy transmission of images.
• Exact specification of page element.
• Greater degree of control.
• File-format running in various platforms including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Unix systems.
• Good multimedia platforms with embedded sounds, images & movies.
• Creation of simple fill-in-the-blanks using Action Script language (an application of the ECMA script programming language).

Cons

Flash Design has these negative sides too, like any other software technology.

• The flash file format is not fully open standard, which minimize the incentive for the support of noncommercial software.
• The boon of graphical nature may turn inactive when it comes to the flash plug in disabled users.

But these disadvantages can be turned to advantages in the future of IT which will enable more wide spread usage of Flash Design in web applications.

FLASH MX

Macromedia Flash MX provides everything you need to create and deploy rich Web content and powerful applications. Whether you are designing motion graphics or building data-driven applications, Flash MX has the tools you need to produce great results and deliver the best user experiences across multiple platforms and devices. Pre-built templates, UI components, an improved timeline, and tighter integration with Macromedia Freehand and Fireworks reduce development time.

The Macromedia Flash MX Solution couples the ubiquitous client technology of Flash Player with a development environment and optimized server-side connectivity allows rich Internet application development to be accomplished quickly. This enables a more immediate, consistent and familiar experience for end users and maximizes the customer experience online.

The image quality of Flash Design animation is very high, it is becoming increasingly popular by the day. Knowing the pros and cons of making Flash design an integral part of your website, will play a major role in decision making.