Macromedia’s Director is used, for the most part, as a broad-bandwidth animation tool. Corporate developers count on it for multimedia demonstrations; CD-ROM makers have built countless Myst knockoffs with it. But even with Shockwave, the stripped-down implementation of Director playback, now in a much improved streaming format, it has not taken over the Web. Measured in developer mindshare, Shockwave still lags behind Java and RealAudio as an accepted extension of what HTML pages can deliver.
Macromedia sought to solve this by purchasing the FutureSplash plug-in and redubbing it, simply, Flash. It exists in three forms: a Netscape plug-in viewer, a Microsoft ActiveX-control viewer and an authoring program. This Flash program, built to manage smaller projects than Director, is being positioned as a Web animation standard. Indeed,
the Microsoft Network and several other high-profile sites on the Web have made frequent use of the technology.
Flash differs from most other Web-graphics technologies because the graphics it manipulates are vector-based, which means the program stores a mathematical description of each shape. Most of the images on the Web, those in JPEG and GIF formats, are bitmapped images, which means they are composed of pixels rather than shapes. This isn’t a problem for Flash — but mapped images imported into the program can be manipulated easily. Of course, whatever edits you make to an image in Flash cannot then be attributed to the bitmapped image. Once you change an image in Flash, it’s “vectored” for good.
Technical issues aside, Macromedia’s challenge with Flash is to encourage its use in spite of the program not being included in standard issue browsers. In contrast, Java is built in to both Microsoft and Netscape browsers. Macromedia’s way to counter this has been to partner with and piggyback on to more accepted technologies. Flash is native in RealSystem 5.0 and can play directly (with some alteration) on a RealPlayer. Also, those creating animations in Flash can save them in Java format (after a bit of fiddling), making them work without a plug-in or ActiveX control. Macromedia calls its attempt to make Director and Flash animations available via Java a “Universal Media Initiative,” but that’s a euphemism for “We need to take advantage of all distribution media, because our proprietary one isn’t universal.”
Expect more from Macromedia as far as making Director and Flash animations work in broader media. The company has begun a DHTML initiative (no doubt to push its Dreamweaver DHTML tool, which we will examine next week) and at least one other unspecified initiative is rumored. Unlike other toolmakers who stick to proprietary architectures no matter what, Macromedia executives seem to understand that the more open a development tool is, the more likely it will survive on the Web.
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Do you use Macromedia Flash? (specialreport@vineyard.com)We want to know.
