Adobe Flash allows users to create complex animations and multimedia and is a program for graphical manipulation which can create vector animations for the web. Flash is also used to create games or entire web sites and thanks to the latest version has become a powerful tool for creating Rich Internet Application platforms and streaming audio / video. Not only: users can also create interactive animations, thanks to the presence of an internal scripting language. Through this language, called ActionScript and ECMAScript-based, it is also easy to handle objects or frames of animation. Initially only few actions were implemented, but at present ActionScript has become a very powerful tool. Thanks to this, you can create menus, navigation systems, GUIs, websites, complete and also complex games.
Another important feature is the ability to maintain reusable symbols in a library. There are different types of symbols, which include simple graphic objects, movie clips (animations with a timeline of their own and independent of the primary ones), buttons and more. All this can simplify the job of the developer, who can change all instances found for the animation. The program is also useful for vector shapes, text and input boxes for text, images (Bitmap, GIF, JPEG, PNG and other formats) in the form of object bitmap, audio (MP3, WAV and others), in both streaming and for sound effects and video (with compression AVI, QuickTime, MPEG, Windows Media Video, FLV). Flash, according to data released by comScore, is used by 81% of all videos available on the web using the infrastructure of the Adobe Flash Player. In addition, the results showed that the software would be installed on 98% of devices, desktop or mobile that are connected to the Internet. This figure is mainly due to the adoption of this technology by YouTube.
Recently it was discovered a flaw in Adobe Flash, through which hackers can manipulate the information contained in the clipboard memory ActionScript used in Flash. This is a dangerous threat of which the online versions of Newsweek and NBC to date have been affected. The “hole” works like this: using the flaw, hackers write a URL in the memory which redirects to an alleged antivirus online service, users using the copy and paste a link lead to other sites chosen by the hacker. Adobe has acknowledged the problem and promised corrective patch.
So far Flash has not arrived on the iPhone because the player was not optimized for the capabilities of the Apple phone. But recently it was announced that Flash technology will soon arrive also on the iPhone. It was Shantanu Narayen, Adobe CEO, who answered questions from journalists from Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos and talked about Flash on the iPhone. And the manager said: “This is a difficult technological challenge and this is why Apple and Adobe are working together to make it possible as soon as possible”. The “lite” version according to Steve Jobs would be poorly effective and the traditional version does not fit to the phone so the two sides are seeking a common approach to enable a stable implementation. Surely something will soon arrive for the mobile phenomenon of the moment.
