Flash design

A Flash designer is no longer a misunderstood term, in recent years the market place has become saturated with Flash designers. So much so Flash designer searching for a flash designer has become as simple as doing a Google. The search however for a professional Flash designer remains a little trickier. There is so much more to quality Flash designing than just owning the software, any professional Flash designer will attest to this.

Flash history

Flash has made it's powerful mark on the web and on standards of design in only a few short years; but powerful entities like this don't appear over night - so where did it come from? Venture forth now, and get spiritually educated. Adobe Flash Designer - previously called Shockwave Flash Designer and Macromedia Flash Designer - is a set of multimedia technologies developed and distributed by Adobe Systems and earlier by Macromedia. Since its introduction in 1996, Flash Designer technology has become a popular method for adding animation and interactivity to web pages; Flash Designer is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, various web page components, to integrate video into web pages, and more recently, to develop rich Internet applications. Flash Designer can manipulate vector and raster graphics and supports bi-directional streaming of audio and video. It contains a scripting language called ActionScript. It is available in most common web browsers and some mobile phones and other electronic devices (using Flash Designer Lite). Several software products, systems, and devices are able to create or display Flash Designer, including the Adobe Flash Designer Player. The Adobe Flash Designer Professional multimedia authoring program used to create content for the Adobe Engagement Platform, such as web applications, games and movies, and content for mobile phones and other embedded devices. Files in the SWF format, traditionally called "Flash Designer movies" or "Flash Designer games", usually have a .swf file extension and may be an object of a web page, strictly "played" in a standalone Flash Designer Player, or incorporated into a Projector, a self-executing Flash Designer movie (with the .exe extension in Microsoft Windows). Flash Designer Video (FLV) files have a .flv file extension and are used from within .swf files. History The program Flash Designer was the brainchild of Jonathan Gay, who developed the idea in college and later while working for Silicon Beach Software and its successors.[2][3] In January 1993, Jonathan Gay, Charlie Jackson, and Michelle Welsh started a small software company called FutureWave Software and created their first product, SmartSketch. A drawing application, SmartSketch was designed to make creating computer graphics as simple as drawing on paper. At first, it didn't gain enough of a foothold in its market. As the Internet began to thrive, however, FutureWave began to realize the potential for a vector-based web animation tool that might easily challenge Macromedia's Shockwave technology. In 1995, FutureWave modified SmartSketch by adding frame-by-frame animation features and re-released it as FutureSplash Animator on Macintosh and PC. By that time, the company had added a second programmer Robert Tatsumi, artist Adam Grofcsik, and PR specialist Ralph Mittman. The product was offered to Adobe and used by Microsoft in its early work with the Internet (MSN). In December 1996, Macromedia acquired the vector-based animation software and later released it as Flash Designer, contracting "Future" and "Splash" of the FutureWave name. Player Macromedia Flash Designer 2 (1997) Features: Support of stereo sound, enhanced bitmap integration, buttons, the Library, and the capability to tween color changes. Macromedia Flash Designer 3 (1998) Features: Brought improvements to animation, playback, and publishing, as well as the introduction of simple script commands for interactivity. As of 1998, Macromedia has shipped 100,000 Flash Designer products. Macromedia Flash Designer 4 (1999) Features: Achieved 100 million installations of the Flash Designer Player, thanks in part to its inclusion with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5. Flash Designer 4 saw the introduction of streaming MP3s and the Motion Tween. Initially, the Flash Designer Player plug-in was not bundled with popular web browsers and users had to visit Macromedia website to download it; As of 2000, however, the Flash Designer Player was already being distributed with all AOL, Netscape and Internet Explorer browsers. Two years later it shipped with all releases of Windows XP. The install-base of the Flash Designer Player reached 92 percent of all Internet users. Macromedia Flash Designer 5 (2001) Features: Flash Designer 5 was a major leap forward in capability, with the evolution of Flash Designer's scripting capabilities as released as ActionScript. Flash Designer 5 also saw the ability to customize the authoring environment's interface. Macromedia Generator was the first initiative from Macromedia to separate design from content in Flash Designer files. Generator 2.0 was released in April 2001 and featured real-time server-side generation of Flash Designer content in its Enterprise Edition. Generator was discontinued in 2002 in favor of new technologies such as Flash Designer Remoting, which allows for seamless transmission of data between the server and the client, and ColdFusion Server. In October 2000, usability guru Jakob Nielsen wrote a polemic article regarding usability of Flash Designer content entitled "Flash Designer 99% Bad". (Macromedia later hired Nielsen to help them improve Flash Designer usability.) In September 2001, a survey made for Macromedia by Media Metrix showed that out of the 10 biggest websites in the United States, seven were making use of Flash Designer content.[citation needed] Macromedia Flash Designer MX was released on March 15, 2002, with the new Macromedia Flash Designer Player 6 with support for video, application components, shared libraries, and accessibility. Macromedia Flash Designer Communication Server MX, also released in 2002, allowed video to be streamed to Flash Designer Player 6 (otherwise the video could be embedded into the Flash Designer movie). Macromedia Flash Designer MX 2004 was released in September 2003, with features such as faster runtime performance up to eight times with the enhanced compiler and the new Macromedia Flash Designer Player 7, ability to create charts, graphs and additional text effects with the new support for extensions (sold separately), high fidelity import of PDF and Adobe Illustrator 10 files, mobile and device development and a forms-based development environment. ActionScript 2.0 was also introduced, giving developers a formal Object-Oriented approach to ActionScript. V2 Components replaced Flash Designer MX's components, being rewritten from the ground up to take advantage of ActionScript 2.0 and Object-Oriented principles. Flash Designer MX 2004 was the first release of Flash Designer to be segmented into "Basic" and "Professional" versions. The Basic version was targeted at traditional Flash Designer animators while the Professional version brought more advanced capabilities that developers would use, for example the data components. In 2004, the "Flash Designer Platform" was introduced. This expanded Flash Designer to more than the Flash Designer authoring tool. Flex 1.0 and Breeze 1.0 were released, both of which utilized the Flash Designer Player as a delivery method but relied on tools other than the Flash Designer authoring program to create Flash Designer applications and presentations. Flash Designer Lite 1.1 was also released, enabling mobile phones to play Flash Designer content. Macromedia Flash Designer 8 (2005) is touted by Macromedia as the most significant upgrade to Flash Designer since Flash Designer 5. New features included filter effects and blending modes, bitmap caching, a new video codec called On2 VP6, an enhanced type rendering engine called Flash DesignerType, an emulator for mobile devices, and several enhancements to the ActionScript 2.0 spec, such as the BitmapData class, several geometric classes, and the ConvolutionFilter and DisplacmentMapFilter classes. Macromedia Flash Designer Lite 2 was also released in 2005, which brought its capabilities in line with Flash Designer Player 7. On December 3, 2005, Adobe Systems acquired Macromedia and its product portfolio (including Flash Designer).[4] Adobe Flash Designer Player 9 was released for Windows and Mac OS in 2006, which marked the first time a Flash Designer Player major release occurred without a simultaneous Flash Designer authoring program major release. Flex 2.0 was released in conjunction with Flash Designer Player 9, and the player was continued when Flash Designer Authoring 9 was released in 2007. For the first time in the history of Flash Designer, the Flash Designer Player had an opportunity to become widely installed before the release of the equivalent Flash Designer program. Adobe Flash Designer Player 9 was released for Linux in January 2007.[5] Adobe Flash Designer 9 Public Alpha was released in 2006, and was a preview of ActionScript 3.0. Adobe Flash Designer CS3 in 2007, originated from Flash Designer 9 Public Alpha with several updates for integrating into other Adobe products, is released as a bundled software of the Adobe Creative Suite 3. This currently-newest version also brings ActionScript 3.0 and a new xml engine to the Flash Designer authoring tool. It also has an improved and optimized GUI like the rest of the CS3 suite. Authoring tool FutureSplash Animator (April 10, 1996): initial version of Flash Designer with basic editing tools and a timeline Macromedia Flash Designer 1 (November 1996): a Macromedia re-branded version of the FutureSplash Animator Macromedia Flash Designer 2 (June 1997): Released with Flash Designer Player 2, new features included: the object library Macromedia Flash Designer 3 (May 31, 1998): Released with Flash Designer Player 3, new features included: the movieclip element, JavaScript plug-in integration, transparency and an external stand alone player Macromedia Flash Designer 4 (June 15, 1999): Released with Flash Designer Player 4, new features included: internal variables, an input field, advanced ActionScript, and streaming MP3 Macromedia Flash Designer 5 (August 24, 2000): Released with Flash Designer Player 5, new features included: ActionScript 1.0 (based on ECMAScript, making it very similar to JavaScript in syntax), XML support, Smartclips (the precursor to components in Flash Designer), HTML text formatting added for dynamic text Macromedia Flash Designer MX (ver 6) (March 15, 2002): Released with Flash Designer Player 6, new features included: a video codec (Sorenson Spark), Unicode, v1 UI Components, compression, ActionScript vector drawing API Macromedia Flash Designer MX 2004 (ver 7) (September 9, 2003): Released with Flash Designer Player 7, new features included: Actionscript 2.0 (which enabled an object-oriented programming model for Flash Designer), behaviors, extensibility layer (JSAPI), alias text support, timeline effects Macromedia Flash Designer MX Professional 2004 (ver 7) (September 9, 2003): Released with Flash Designer Player 7, new features included all Flash Designer MX 2004 features plus: Screens (forms for non-linear state-based development and slides for organizing content in a linear slide format like PowerPoint), web services integration, video import wizard, Media Playback components (which encapsulate a complete MP3 and/or FLV player in a component that may be placed in an SWF), Data components (DataSet, XMLConnector, WebServicesConnector, XUpdateResolver, etc) and data binding APIs, the Project Panel, v2 UI components, and Transition class libraries. Macromedia Flash Designer Basic 8 (released on September 13, 2005): A less feature-rich version of the Flash Designer authoring tool targeted at new users who only want to do basic drawing, animation and interactivity. Released with Flash Designer Player 8, this version of the product has limited support for video and advanced graphical and animation effects. Macromedia Flash Designer Professional 8 (released on September 13, 2005): Released with the Flash Designer Player 8, Flash Designer Professional 8 added features focused on expressiveness, quality, video, and mobile authoring. New features included Filters and blend modes, easing control for animation, enhanced stroke properties (caps and joins), object-based drawing mode, run-time bitmap caching, Flash DesignerType advanced anti-aliasing for text, On2 VP6 advanced video codec, support for alpha transparency in video, a stand-alone encoder and advanced video importer, cue point support in FLV files, an advanced video playback component, and an interactive mobile device emulator. Adobe Flash Designer CS3 Professional (as version 9, released on April 16, 2007): Flash Designer CS3 is the first version of Flash Designer released under the Adobe name. CS3 features full support for ActionScript 3.0, allows things to be converted into ActionScript, adds better integration with other Adobe products such as Adobe Photoshop, and also provides better Vector drawing behavior, becoming more similar to Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Fireworks. (*Adobe Flash Designer 10 Astro - the new version of Flash Designer, will contain inverse kinematics (bones), c++ and 3d rotation.) Future developments Adobe Labs (previously Macromedia Labs) is a source for early looks at emerging products and technologies from Adobe-Macromedia, including downloads of the latest software and plugins. Flash Designer 9, Flex 3, and ActionScript 3.0 are discussed on the labs.adobe.com website. An important new development in Flash Designer (as of 2007) is its increasing use in providing the presentation layer in handheld devices. Adobe is courting cell phone and PDA vendors, and partnering to deploy Flash Designer Lite as the user interface. As of November 2007 Adobe Labs is developing the Adobe AIR Project[6] which is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to reuse their existing web development skills (Flash Designer, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). The next version of Flash Designer will have two additional components designed for large scale implementation. Adobe is adding in the option to require an ad to be played in full before the main video piece is played. This would be most useful for large scale video sites. Also, Adobe has announced plans to add DRM into the new version of Flash Designer. This way Adobe can give companies the option to link an advertisement with content and make sure that both are played and that they not be changed.[7] Programming language Main article: ActionScript Initially focused on animation, early versions of Flash Designer content offered few interactivity features and thus had very limited scripting capability. More recent versions include ActionScript, an implementation of the ECMAScript standard which therefore has the same syntax as JavaScript, but in a different programming framework with a different associated set of class libraries. ActionScript is used to create almost all of the interactivity (buttons, text entry fields, pick lists) seen in many Flash Designer applications. Flash Designer MX 2004 introduced ActionScript 2.0, a scripting programming language more suited to the development of Flash Designer applications. It is often possible to save a lot of time by scripting something rather than animating it, which usually also enables a higher level of editability. Since The Arrival of the Flash Designer Player 9 alpha a newer version of ActionScript has been released, ActionScript 3.0. ActionScript 3.0 is an object oriented programming language allowing for more control and code reusability when building complex Flash Designer applications. ActionScript 3.0 has also allowed for formal software engineering methods to be implemented when working with Flash Designer, this is because of the object oriented programming approach. Of late, the Flash Designer libraries are being used with the XML capabilities of the browser to render rich content in the browser. This techonology is known as Asynchronous Flash Designer and XML, much like AJAX. This technology of Asynchronous Flash Designer and XML has pushed for a more formal approach of this technology called Adobe Flex, which uses the Flash Designer runtime to build Rich Internet Applications. This technology can be used in players like those on MySpace and YouTube, to provide protection for the content that the Flash Designer calls, like MP3s and videos. The content called is streamed - or passes - through the Flash Designer files, making downloading for storage a difficult task for most people. Programs such as Real Player Downloader and browser extensions like Firebug can trace the XML files. Content protection Often, Flash Designer authors will decide that while they desire the advantages that Flash Designer affords them in the areas of animation and interactivity, they do not wish to expose their images and/or code to the world. However, once an .swf file is saved locally, it may then quite easily be decompiled into its source code and assets. Some decompilers are capable of nearly full reconstruction of the original source file, down to the actual code that was used during creation.[citation needed] In opposition to the decompilers, SWF obfuscators have been introduced to provide a modicum of security, some produced by decompiler authors themselves. The higher-quality obfuscators use traps for the decompilers, making some fail, but none have definitively been shown to protect all content. Competition Format and plug-in This article or section contains instructions, advice, or how-to content. The purpose of Wikipedia is to present facts, not to teach subject matter. Please help improve this article by removing or rewriting the how-to content, which may qualify for a move to Wikibooks. Compared to other plug-ins such as Java, Acrobat Reader, QuickTime or Windows Media Player, the Flash Designer Player has a small install size, quick download time, and fast initialization time. However, care must be taken to detect and embed the Flash Designer Player in (X)HTML in a W3C compliant way. A simple and widely used workaround is provided below: More Information on how to detect and embed Flash Designer Objects in a W3C compliant way is provided in the xSWF description. The use of vector graphics combined with program code allows Flash Designer files to be smaller, or streams to use less bandwidth, than the corresponding bitmaps or video clips. For content in a single format (such as just text, video or audio) other alternatives may provide better performance and consume less CPU power than the corresponding Flash Designer movie, for example when using transparency or making large screen updates such as photographic or text fades. In addition to a vector-rendering engine, the Flash Designer Player includes a virtual machine called the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM) for scripting interactivity at run-time, support for video, MP3-based audio, and bitmap graphics. As of Flash Designer Player 8, it offers two video codecs: On2 Technologies VP6 and Sorenson Spark, and run-time support for JPEG, Progressive JPEG, PNG, and GIF. In the next version, Flash Designer is slated to use a just-in-time compiler for the ActionScript engine. Market share Flash Designer as a format has become very widespread on the desktop market and created a market dominance. Adobe claims that 98 percent of US Web users and 99.3 percent of all Internet desktop users have the Flash Designer Player installed,[8][9] with 45%–56%[10] (depending on region) having the latest version. Numbers vary depending on the detection scheme and research demographics. Flash Designer players exist for a wide variety of different systems and devices. Flash Designer content can run consistently on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, and Linux (Macromedia has created or licensed players for the following operating systems: Windows, Mac OS 9/X, Solaris, HP-UX, Pocket PC, OS/2, QNX, Symbian, Palm OS, BeOS, and IRIX). See also Macromedia Flash Designer Lite for Flash Designer compatibility on other devices. Open standard alternatives A full end-to-end implementation of the W3C SVG and SMIL specifications would offer close competition for most of the features of Flash Designer 8 and earlier.[citation needed] Adobe used to develop and distribute the 'Adobe SVG Viewer' client plug-in for MS Internet Explorer, but has recently announced its discontinuation.[11] It has been noted by industry commentators that this is probably no coincidence at a time when Adobe has moved from competing with Macromedia's Flash Designer, to owning the technology itself.[12] Meanwhile, Opera has supported SVG since version 8,[13] and Firefox's built-in support for SVG continues to grow.[14] Open source did take a shot at developing a complete replacement for Adobe Flash Designer. This program was called UIRA. This project collapsed, however, in mid 2007, though people are now being called upon to revive/continue the project.[15] In May, 2008 Adobe launch Open Screen Project which will remove restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications. Third-party implementation Specifications In October 1998, Macromedia disclosed the Flash Designer Version 3 Specification to the world on its website. It did this in response to many new and often semi-open formats competing with SWF, such as Xara's Flare and Sharp's Extended Vector Animation formats. Several developers quickly created a C library for producing SWF. In February 1999, the company introduced MorphInk 99, the first third party program to create SWF files. Macromedia also hired Middlesoft to create a freely available developers' kit for the SWF file format versions 3 to 5.www.codefuse.com Macromedia made the Flash Designer Files specifications for versions 6 and later available only under a non-disclosure agreement, but it is widely available from various sites. In April 2006, the Flash Designer SWF file format specification was released with details on the then newest version format (Flash Designer 8). Although still lacking specific information on the incorporated video compression formats (On2, Sorenson Spark, etc.), this new documentation covered all the new features offered in Flash Designer v8 including new ActionScript commands, expressive filter controls, and so on. The file format specification document is offered only to developers who agree to a license agreement that permits them to use the specifications only to develop programs that can export to the Flash Designer file format. The license forbids the use of the specifications to create programs that can be used for playback of Flash Designer files. The Flash Designer 9 specification was made available under similar restrictions.[16] Playback Since Flash Designer files do not depend on an open standard such as SVG, this reduces the incentive for non-commercial software to support the format,[citation needed] although there are several third party tools which use and generate the SWF file format. IrfanView is capable of playing SWF files. There is a large and vibrant open source community. Flash Designer Player cannot ship as part of a pure open source, or completely free operating system, as its distribution is bound to the Macromedia Licensing Program and subject to approval. There is, as of late 2007, no complete free software replacement which offers all the functionality of the latest version of Adobe Flash Designer Player. Gnash, based on GameSWF, is a Flash Designer player replacement that is under development and has the support of the Free Software Foundation - see High Priority Free Software Projects. Gnash supports Flash Designer 7 and below, but not files that require version 8 or 9 features.[17] Swfdec is another open-source Flash Designer player available for Linux and FreeBSD and SWFOpener is a quite good program if functionality is needed. Authoring Open Source projects like Ajax Animator, and (the now defunct) UIRA aim to create a Flash Designer development environment, complete with a graphical user environment. Alternatively, programs such as swfmill, SWFTools, and MTASC provide tools to create SWF files, but do so by compiling text, actionscript or XML files into Flash Designer animations. It is also possible to create SWF files programmatically using the Ming library, which has interfaces for C, PHP, C++, Perl, Python, and Ruby. haXe is an open source, high-level object-oriented programming language geared towards web-content creation that can compile Flash Designer files. Many shareware developers produced Flash Designer creation tools and sold them for under US$50 between 2000 and 2002. In 2003 competition and the emergence of free Flash Designer creation tools had driven many third-party Flash Designer-creation tool-makers out of the market, allowing the remaining developers to raise their prices, although many of the products still cost less than US$100 and support ActionScript. As for open source tools, KToon can edit vectors and generate SWF, but its interface is very different from Macromedia's. Another, more recent example of a Flash Designer creation tool is SWiSH Max made by an ex-employee of Macromedia. Toon Boom Technologies also sells traditional animation tool, based on Flash Designer - Toon-Army. Anime Studio is a 2D animation software specialised for character animation which creates SWF files. Express Animator is similarly aimed specifically at animators. Users that are not programmers or web designers will also find on line tools that allows to build a full Flash Designer-based web site. One of the oldest services available (1998) is Flash DesignerToGo. Such companies provide a wide variety of pre-built models (templates) associated to a Content Management System that empowers users to easily build, edit and publish their web sites. Adobe wrote a software package called Adobe LiveMotion, designed to create interactive animation content and export it to a variety of formats, including SWF. LiveMotion went through two major releases, but failed to gain any notable user base. In February 2003, Macromedia purchased Presedia, which had developed a Flash Designer authoring tool that automatically converted PowerPoint Files into Flash Designer. Macromedia subsequently released the new product as Breeze, which included many new enhancements. Since that time, Macromedia has seen competing PowerPoint-to-Flash Designer authoring tools from PointeCast (not to be confused with PointCast) and PresentationPro among others. In addition, (as of version 2) Apple's Keynote presentation software also allows users to create interactive presentations and export to SWF. Criticisms Main article: Criticism of Adobe Flash Designer Criticism of Adobe Flash Designer have included questions of its usability, the problems Flash Designer-laden pages cause for those with disabilities, its use as a means to restrict access to content, security issues, variations between platforms, the inability for search engines to index data contained in Flash Designer binary data and the implementation of DRM. Related file formats and extensions Ext. Explanation .swf .swf files are completed, compiled and published files that cannot be edited with Adobe Flash Designer. However, many '.swf decompilers' do exist. Attempting to import .swf files using Flash Designer allows it to retrieve some assets from the .swf, but not all. .fla .fla files contain source material for the Flash Designer application. Flash Designer authoring software can edit FLA files and compile them into .swf files. .as .as files contain ActionScript source code in simple source files. FLA files can also contain Actionscript code directly, but separate external .as files often emerge for structural reasons, or to expose the code to versioning applications. They sometimes use the extension .actionscript .swd .swd files are temporary debugging files used during Flash Designer development. Once finished developing a Flash Designer project these files are not needed and can be removed. .asc .asc files contain Server-Side ActionScript, which is used to develop efficient and flexible client-server Macromedia Flash Designer Communication Server MX applications. .flv .flv files are Flash Designer video files, as created by Adobe Flash Designer, ffmpeg, Sorenson Squeeze, or On2 Flix. .f4v .f4v files are standard mp4 files that can be played back by Flash Designer Player 9 Update 3 and above.[19] .f4p .f4p files are mp4 files with digital rights management.[19] .f4a .f4a files are mp4 files that contain only audio streams.[19] .f4b .f4b files are mp4 audio book files.[19] .swc .swc files are used for distributing components; they contain a compiled clip, the component's ActionScript class file, and other files that describe the component. .jsfl .jsfl files are used to add functionality in the Flash Designer Authoring environment; they contain Javascript code and access the Flash Designer Javascript API. .swt .swt files are 'templatized' forms of .swf files, used by Macromedia Generator .flp .flp files are XML files used to reference all the document files contained in a Flash Designer Project. Flash Designer Projects allow the user to group multiple, related files together to assist in Flash Designer project organization, compilation and build. .spl .spl files are FutureSplash documents. .aso .aso files are cache files used during Flash Designer development, containing compiled ActionScript byte code. An ASO file is recreated when a change in its corresponding class files is detected. Occasionally the Flash Designer IDE does not recognize that a recompile is necessary, and these cache files must be deleted manually. They are located in %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Designer8\en\Configuration\Classes\aso on Win32 / Flash Designer8. .lmv These files are created by the freeware program called liveswif.They are used to save the animation in an editable file , but can also be converted into an .swf file to produce online content for the web. This file has nothing to do with adobe Flash Designer Fla file , with the only similarity being that they both hold editable data that can be converted into a swf file. Video in web pages Flash Designer is increasingly used as a way to display video clips on web pages, a feature available since Flash Designer Player version 6. The key to this success has been the player's wide distribution in multiple browsers and operating systems, rather than any superior video quality or properties. It is available for many popular platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Flash Designer is used as the basis for many popular video sites, including YouTube and Google Video. One major flaw with multimedia embedded through Flash Designer, however, is the considerable performance penalty placed on playback hardware as compared with a purpose built multimedia playback system. Many files that drop frames and skip audio when embedded within Flash Designer play without any issues using other multimedia formats on the same hardware. Flash Designer Video (.flv files) is a container format, meaning that it is not a video format in itself, but can contain other formats. The video in Flash Designer is encoded in H.263, and starting with Flash Designer player 8, it may alternatively be encoded in VP6. The audio is in MP3. The use of VP6 is common in many companies, because of the large adoption rates of Flash Designer Player 8 and Flash Designer Player 9.[10] On August 20, 2007, Adobe announced on its blog that with Update 3 of the Flash Designer Player, Flash Designer Video will also support the MPEG-4 international standard.[20] Specifically, Flash Designer Player will have support for video compressed in H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10), audio compressed using AAC (MPEG-4 Part 3), the MP4, M4V, M4A, 3GP and MOV multimedia container formats (MPEG-4 Part 14), 3GPP Timed Text specification (MPEG-4 Part 17) which is a standardized subtitle format and partial parsing support for the 'ilst' atom which is the ID3 equivalent iTunes uses to store metadata. Adobe also announced that they will be gradually moving away from the proprietary FLV format to the standard MP4 format owing to functional limits with the FLV structure when streaming H.264. The final release of the Flash Designer Player supporting MPEG-4 had become available in Fall 2007.[21]

London Flash Designer