Flash Club

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A Brief History of Time and Flash

A club held on Wednesday lunch times in Room 63. It was originally run by Mr Vass and was only available every other Wednesday due to Programming Club being on their at the same time. Now it is held every Wednesday, no longer by Mr. Vass, but Miss Ridings and Programming Club was moved to every Monday.

What is the Flash for?

Many of you have probably heard of Adobe Flash Player or maybe Flash (.flv) vidoes. Flash is an application used for making animated videos. It is very useful because it saves artists from drawing out each individual frame in a video as it has motion and shape tweens with a choice of different rotations which will automatically draw out most of the frames automatically. More recent versions also allow linked wireframe structures to be animated automatically.

Flash was originally the making of Macromedia, along with Fireworks, Dreamweaver and others which can be found on the school computers. Macromedia let people download their products for free and that's how the school obtained the software. Macromedia was then taken over by Adobe, who started selling the Macromedia applications that were previously open source to the public, for hundreds of pounds each! Adobe have changed the names to Adobe Flash, Adobe Dreamweaver, etc. and created newer versions of the applications.

The recent versions of Fireworks are noticeably slower and lack some of the older special effects filters. Flash has definitely gotten better though now that tweens can be made from one object to a completely different object. It would perhaps have remained better for the public if Macromedia hadn't been taken over, then the software would be free and Macromedia could focus souly on the few applications that have published, whereas Adobe have many applications, many of which are very similar.

At least Adobe give out free trials for 30 days on each product.