NYKNAK games

What is flash?

Flash is a browser plug-in that can display SWF files.

It can present interactive animations and sounds.

It uses vector graphics, so the SWF file size can be small.



What are vector graphics?
SWF 212 bytes

Vector graphics are symbols that are drawn using attributes like height, width, color, position, transparency...

They look perfect when magnified but are not good with lots of details.

Flash files can also have GIF and JPG graphics in it.

JPG 1,878 bytes

In the JPG format, each byte in the file describes the colors of a group pixels.

The JPG format is great for photo realistic images.

They look good when magnified and have a large range of compression-quality levels

GIF 4,141 bytes

In the GIF format, each byte in the file describes the colors of a group pixels.

The GIF format has sharp detail that is great for small icons.

It also has a full transparent mode and an animation mode.

The animation works by cycling through several images stored in the same file.

They can look bad when magnified and with larger images the file size gets drastically bigger.

PNG 4,348 bytes

The PNG format can use pixel and vector graphics.

It has a wide variety of compression-quality levels and effects.

It is not a plug-in so browsers might support them differently.



history

Flash was originaly developed by Macromedia and later sold to Adobe.

Developers would buy the flash-editor to create flash-movies and the flash-player is given away free as a browser plug-in.
Developers would also get a stand-alond flash-player that isn't installed into the browser.

The flash-player here www.adobe.com/go/getflash lets you install the flash plug-in using an install wizard, which is also good if you need to upgrade your flash.

This page www.adobe.com/products/flash/about will attempt to install flash automaticaly.
With firefox-browser, you will be asked if you want to start installation. On IE, it will download in the background ( 5 mins for dialup ) and when done it will pop up a window asking if you want to install flash.



June-2007
NYKNAK games