Pros and Cons of Macromedia Flash

Adobe Flash (formerly called "Macromedia Flash") is a multimedia and software platform used for designing vector graphics, animation, games and rich Internet applications (RIAs) that can be viewed, played and executed in Adobe Flash Player. Flash is frequently used to add streamed video or audio players, advertisements and interactive multimedia content to web pages.

Adobe Flash allows you to work with vector, raster, and three-dimensional graphics. The standard format for compiled flash-files (animation, games and interactive applications) is .SWF.

The basis of flash animation is vector morphing – the smooth overflow from one key frame to another. It allows making complicated animated scenes, by asking just a few key frames.

Flash uses ActionScript as the programming language.

ActionScript is an object-oriented programming language. It is one of the ECMAScript dialects that adds interactivity, data processing and much more in the contents of Flash-applications.

With the help of ActionScript, you can create interactive multimedia applications, games, websites and a lot of others.

Why Flash may not be so good

The main disadvantages of flash-applications is the excessive burden on CPU’s because of its inefficiency of the Flash Player virtual machine. Though it should be noted that sometimes the cause is the lack of flash-application optimization by its developers, and the use of flash-application generators.

The second disadvantage of flash-applications are the lack of mistake control. It leads to frequent failures of the applications and in some cases even the entire browser can be harmed. The ability of flash-applications to disrupt the work of entire browser repeatedly provoked the criticism from browser developers.

Another disadvantage that is typical to all virtual machines is that not there is not always the ability to run the flash-application, as it has some difficulties. For example, some users or admins switch off the flash-content in browsers settings. It links with the system resources by getting rid of any annoying ads, popups and tight information security. This disadvantage makes the Flash technology less universal and limits its use in many web applications.

The final disadvantage is that the using flash to place text information makes it difficult to index by search engines.