Adobe Flash

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Adobe Flash

animation software

Also known as: Flash, Macromedia Flash

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Adobe Flash, animation software produced by Adobe Systems Incorporated from 2005 to 2020.

The development of Adobe Flash software can be traced back to American software developer Jonathan Gay’s first experiments with writing programs on his Apple II computer in high school during the 1980s. Before long, Gay had written a graphics program for the Apple II using Pascal. Later, he teamed up with a local Macintosh users-group organizer, Charlie Jackson, who started a Macintosh software company called Silicon Beach Software. At Silicon Beach Software, Gay combined animation and digital sound to create the Macintosh electronic game Airborne!. Eventually, in his drive to create animation software compatible with Apple Inc.’s Macintosh and Microsoft Corporation’s Windows programs, he produced SmartSketch, a program in which users could draw on the computer screen with an electronic pen. This was the start of his own software company, FutureWave Software, in the mid-1990s.

As the Internet grew in popularity, FutureWave added two-dimensional animation features to SmartSketch that let Internet users display graphics and animation over the World Wide Web, and FutureSplash Animator was born. The program’s first success came when Microsoft used the software for their MSN website. Macromedia, Inc., bought the rights to FutureSplash Animator in 1996, creating Macromedia Flash, which became Adobe Flash after Adobe purchased Macromedia in 2005. Adobe Flash allowed users to create animation for use on the Internet, and Adobe’s Flash Player was one of the most widely distributed applications on the Internet in the early 21st century, with many websites using the software.

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HTML5 was the latest and widely available standard of the HTML language that encoded websites and allowed animation to be made without Flash. In 2010 Apple cofounder Steve Jobs wrote “Thoughts on Flash,” in which he explained why Flash was not allowed on Apple’s mobile devices, the iPhone, the iPod, and the iPad. Jobs reproved Adobe for Flash’s poor security, frequent crashing, and voracious battery consumption. Through the 2010s many websites transitioned from Flash to HTML5. Adobe ended support for Flash on December 31, 2020.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Erik Gregersen.

vector graphics

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vector graphics

computer science

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Last Updated: Apr 19, 2025 • Article History

Related Topics:: computer graphics; Adobe Illustrator

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vector graphics, mathematically based computer image format.

Vector graphics, composed of lines defined by mathematical formulas, were first used in computer displays in the 1960s and ’70s. The displays were essentially modified oscilloscopes, and vector graphics were used because the memory that would be needed for displaying raster graphics, or bit-mapped graphics, was too expensive. Vector graphics were also used in early arcade games such as Asteroids. By the 1980s, raster graphics, which use dots called pixels to create an image, had all but replaced vector graphic displays.

Vector graphics made a comeback, however. Graphic designers use vector graphics to create graphics that need to be scaled. The nature of vector graphics, where each line, curve, shape, and colour is mathematically defined, lends itself to creating images that can be scaled down for a business card or up for a billboard. The popularity of vector graphics led the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to create a graphics language called scalable vector graphics (SVG). SVG is a royalty-free language that contains vector shapes and text and can contain embedded raster graphics. One common application for vector graphics in general, and SVG specifically, is in geographic information systems (GIS). SVG is used in GIS applications to produce maps that are scalable and interactive.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Erik Gregersen.