Datasheet

positioned Flash MX and MX 2004 as development environments for what the company began to
call rich internet applications (RIAs). Although the development environment that was Flash never
fully satisfied the requirements of application developers (see the discussion in the section “Flex
versus Flash development” of issues that are commonly encountered in Flash when developing
true applications), the Flash Player continued to grow in its ability to host the finished applica-
tions, however they were built.
After Adobe Systems purchased Macromedia, Flash became a part of the Adobe Creative Suite 3
(CS3) product bundles. Along with this rebundling came increased integration with other CS3
products such as Illustrator and Photoshop. Other Adobe products such as AfterEffects and
Premiere received new export features that allow their video-based output files to be integrated
into Flash-based presentations.
Table 1.2 describes the major milestones in the history of the Flash Player.
TABLE 1.2
Flash Player History
Version Year New Features
Macromedia Flash Player 1 1996 Basic Web animation
Macromedia Flash Player 2 1997 Vector graphics, some bitmap support, some audio
support; object library
Macromedia Flash Player 3 1998 The movieclip element; alpha transparency, MP3
compression; standalone player; JavaScript plug-in
integration
Macromedia Flash Player 4 1999 Advanced ActionScript; internal variables; the input field
object; streaming MP3
Macromedia Flash Player 5 2000 ActionScript 1.0; XML support; Smartclips (a component-
based architecture); HTML 1.0 text formatting
Macromedia Flash Player 6 2002 Flash remoting for integration with application servers;
screen reader support; Sorenson Sparc video codec
Macromedia Flash Player 7 2003 Streaming audio and video; ActionScript 2; first version
associated with Flex
Macromedia Flash Player 8 2005 GIF and PNG graphic loading; ON VP6 video codec;
faster performance; visual filters including blur and
drop shadow; file upload and download; improved text
rendering; new security features
Adobe Flash Player 9 2006 ActionScript 3; faster performance; E4X XML parsing;
binary sockets; regular expressions
Adobe Flash Player 9 Update3 2007 H.264 video; hardware-accelerated full-screen video
playback
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About Flex 3
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