Tom Arah examines what the recent Flash-based developments mean for the future.

Amazingly, the Flash SWF format’s rise to dominance began with its ability to embed simple, cartoon-style vector animations into HTML web pages to give them a bit of a lift...

The format could well have died like any number of other proprietary player add-ons, but Macromedia added new must-have design capabilities with each new release – bitmap and text handling, MP3 audio, simple interactivity, server-side integration, advanced programmability, in-built user interface (UI) components and, perhaps most important of all, video. Each new design feature meant that more authors used the technology, producing more content and so driving end user take-up of the latest player. The end result is that Adobe, who acquired Macromedia in 2005, can now claim that Flash is “the most pervasive software platform” with 98.7% of internet-enabled desktops able to access Flash content. It’s been a story of continuous breakneck development so expectations were high for the latest release and the first under Adobe’s management.
But they weren’t fulfilled – at least not at first sight. While the last Macromedia release, Flash Professional 8, saw a whole host of major new design benefits, such as support for blend modes, bitmap effects, improved text display and a new video codec with alpha support, the new features in Adobe’s first release, Flash CS3 Professional, are largely tinkering around the edge. In particular, while the new integration with Illustrator and Photoshop will help creativity and workflow, there’s little new design power within Flash CS3 Professional itself. Adobe was forced to hype up less-than-thrilling advances such as the ability to convert complex tween-based animations to complex ActionScript, an improved but still awkward skinning system for UI components and new tools for adding – wait for it – rectangles and ovals.
While most of the changes were tweaks at best, there was one undeniably fundamental development. What makes Flash CS3 Professional stand out as a watershed release is its introduction of the entirely new ActionScript 3.0 scripting language. This is a total rewrite of the existing ActionScript 2.0 (still included for backwards compatibility) with a completely new language based on the ECMAScript standard targeting a completely reworked Flash Player API (Application Programming Interface). The changes are so fundamental that, for the first time, it was necessary to add an entirely new ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2) to the associated Flash Player 9 to execute ActionScript 3.0 content (the original AVM1 remains for backwards compatibility). The result is a modern and powerful, object-oriented, class-based programming environment with superior debugging capabilities producing more robust applications capable of dealing with large datasets and which, thanks to the new AVM2, can process code up to 10 times faster.