‘It’s an animation tool,’ ‘It’s a graphics program,’ ‘It’s a movie player,’ ‘It’s a plug-in to a browser.’ ‘It’s a multimedia tool,’ ‘It’s a timeline program,’ ‘It makes movies for the web,’ ‘It’s an advanced programming language.’ ‘It’s a SWF file,’ ‘It’s an entire eco-system for web development,’ ‘It’s the most popular programming language for e-learning.’ ‘It is what Captivate and Camtasia put out.’
Like the story of the blind men and the elephant, it depends on what part you’re involved with. It’s all of these things and a lot more.
The story of how Flash became nearly a household word is an interesting one; why it happened is a great model of Darwinianism as it exists on the Internet. The Internet is a very fast-evolving communal organism and barely existed 20 years ago. About half way in it’s evolution (say 10 years ago) a little animation program called Flash emerged and was bought by Macromedia. At the time it was purely an animation program for the Internet. That last part is key because, though a strange little organism in itself, it was wholly adapted to the new world by its use of vector graphics. Vector graphics – as you might know – is far more efficient for Internet use than technology mostly available to Flash’s competitors (animated GIFs, anyone??). Flash was quickly adopted by people whose only interest was placing a quacking duck on their website. This – such were the conditions in those days – it was thought would attract more eyeballs than the competing sites that were all gray text with still images. From there, Flash as a successful niche-dweller, was poised to take off. It’s owners began adding power for the animator to use (remember tellTarget()??) and over time (remember this is all over 10 years)….we ended up with this platypus of an animation program with also an advanced object oriented programming language called ActionScript tacked on.
Flash has become a very widely-used e-learning development tool for a lot of reasons. Mainly, its flexibility. This is both a strength and a weakness. As a strength, it allows the developer to think freely about what the user or learner needs to have presented in order to get the content into his or her mind. As a weakness, it means that there’s a lot of complexity in the programming needed to create great content in Flash.