Happy Birthday Flash
Adobe is celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Flash technology. Over the last 10 years Flash has become a fundement part of the web. The Flash Player is installed on over 600million internet-connected PCs (and Macs!).
According to the PR folks:
"Thanks to Flash, Web sites are now engaging, interactive, accessible experiences for a variety of industries including entertainment, consumer goods, government and education. First introduced in 1996, Flash originated as a revolutionary vector based animation tool providing an efficient method for creating moving graphics for Web sites. At the time, Web sites were static, and had primitive means of engaging a viewer with basic mouse clicks and hyperlinks. Today, Flash is a complete multimedia development environment used to create everything from rich Internet applications to mobile device content"
In other words, Flash allows developers and web designers to offer really, really cool applications, video and user experiences.
How did we get here? Here's a snapshot of the last 10 years...
1996: FutureSplash is born; Macromedia acquires FutureWave
1997: FutureSplash ships as Macromedia Flash 1.0; Flash 2.0 (and Flash Player) released
1998: Flash ships 100,000th product; Flash 3.0 ships
1999: Flash Player included in Internet Explorer 5.0; Flash Player installs reach 100 million; Flash 4.0 released; www.flashkit.com launches to become the largest online community for Flash developers
2000: Flash Player Penetration reaches 92% of all users; First Flashforward conference- First Flash live community events; Flash 5 and Flash Player 5 Released
2001: Flash goes mobile on Symbian OS
2002: Flash MX, Studio MX, and Flash 6 Player released with support for video
2003: Flash MX 2004 and Flash Player 7 released
2004: FlashLite 1.0 released; Flex 1.0 released; JibJab uses Flash to launch ‘This Land’ animation that takes over the web
2005 - FlashCast goes live in Japan; FlashLite 2.0 released; NTT DoCoMo launches i-cast based on FlashCast server and FlashLite technology; Flash 8 released (and Flash Player 8); Adobe acquires Macromedia
2006: Flash Player 9.0 released; 100 Million Flash Lite enabled units shipped; Verizon announces first US based Flash mobile service; Samsung ships first handset with Flash-based UI in Europe
For more info, please visit anniversary