Celebrating ten years of Flash community

by R Blank

Flash recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. As an active participant in the Flash community, I thought it would be appropriate to step through Flash history and reflect on the community and how it has played a pivotal role in helping Flash users learn, grow, and achieve success with the product.

Approaching the unfamiliar

When I graduated from college in 1998, I got my first job as an HTML jockey at a web agency in New York City. Lucky for me, that firm (now perished) was an early adopter of Flash technology. Soon, I found myself straying from HTML and experimenting with Flash 3 to help build an e-commerce site for Tiffany.

Soon Flash 4 was released. With its 12 actions and tiny little wizard scripting window as well as bitmap and audio support, Flash unleashed an amazing era of imaginativeness, as creative professionals around the world discovered the tool and began to execute on visions that were previously impossible to create and distribute for universal enjoyment.

Of course, there was a steep learning curve. The first wave of people to embrace Flash (designers, animators, and developers) hadn't seen anything like it: a tool that combined design, animation, and programming and featured a timeline-based authoring environment.

In fact, many people, like me, who discovered Flash in the early days, grasped for ways to approach this new tool. We had various backgrounds: graphic and web design; programming and web development; traditional and digital animation; and motion, video, and audio design specialties.

While we approached Flash from different backgrounds, we early adopters shared one thing in common: We were forced to learn new skills to complete even the most basic Flash project.

And learning Flash wasn't easy. Like many of you, I learned HTML by viewing the source code of other sites, and I learned image compression from Lynda Weinman's books. Flash, on the other hand, is a compiled format, meaning it was not easy to see other people's source. At the same time, in the late 1990s, there were basically no books available that treated Flash as a serious tool.

Community to the rescue

Lacking these standard learning resources, I searched for like-minded individuals and quickly discovered a vibrant Flash user community.

So, I turned to the community — sites like FlashKit and Were-Here and mailing lists like ChattyFig. I became involved with my local user group and eventually became a founding manager of LA Flash, a Los Angeles-based user group. I also attended conferences like Flashforward and FITC, where Flash users shared code, hints, and tips and tricks, and provided an amazing network of support.

Eventually, many designers learned animation and design. Animators learned to script. Coders adapted to the timeline. Non-web people learned about basic digital compression standards. Web people gradually freed themselves from the limitations of HTML. And together, Flash users learned how to deal with new issues (such as skip intro, the browser back button, and searchable content).

Spurring innovation

As the first truly universal language for multimedia interactivity, Flash inspired tremendous creativity. The intersection of skills, disciplines, and perspectives resulted in tremendous innovation. In fact, developers continued to use Flash in ways Macromedia had never conceived, such as Joshua Davis with his PrayStation and Once-Upon-A-Forest projects and Yugo Nakamura's YugoP website.

But throughout the world, lesser-known developers were pushing the boundaries of Flash. Brian Zick, a Los Angeles–based artist and illustrator, used Flash to distribute dynamic and interactive artwork on thin-client technology. Jennifer Shiman, an animation and cartoon illustrator, turned her love of cartoons into a series of short cartoons, most notably 30 Second Bunny Theater now running on the Starz cable network.

The beginning of an ecosystem

The level of activity around Flash was further heightened by the fact that SWF was an open format—meaning other developers and software makers could create products and services to extend or facilitate Flash development.

We saw extensions and services that helped people deal with text, 3D, and character animation within Flash. We also saw tools such as Wildform Flix, which was the first video encoder for Flash. Other SWF-based tools, such as Breeze® and Captivate™, were created by other firms and subsequently acquired by Macromedia.

One step forward, two steps back

Despite the excitement, Flash was still largely considered a tool for creating banner ads, games, greeting cards, and websites that were, in the immortal words of Jakob Nielsen, "99% bad." (Nielsen later worked for Macromedia as a usability specialist.)

Then, Flash 5 was released. It featured major improvements in every aspect of the tool, from the programming language to the multimedia and data-handling capabilities and especially to the development environment.

Shortly thereafter, Colin Moock released ActionScript: The Definitive Guide, which was the first solid piece of documentation to treat Flash as a serious development tool that guided an entire generation of developers through their work.

Flash users of all stripes started taking their work more seriously, and developers started building more professional projects — even applications. Unfortunately, at the same time, many of the dot-com firms that had been spending money on Flash development went out of business, and many people who had specialized in the technology were out of work.

Many conferences went out of business or were dramatically scaled back. Those developers who continued with Flash still shared information through the community websites, but the community's enthusiasm diminished noticeably. Most people didn't really respect or understand what Flash users did, which contributed to a lack of spending on Flash projects. "I'm a Flash developer," I would explain. "Oh, you design websites?" would be the reply.

Keeping hope alive

During this downturn in the economy, LA Flash was born. Los Angeles, the largest city in the United States, really needed a user group for Flash — a place for developers to learn, share experiences, discuss the industry, and, most importantly, network. The economy was not supporting much Flash development, but in a city of more than 12 million, I pulled together an initial meeting of 40 people. For the first eight months, average attendance was about 20 (and there was a distinctly amateur feeling to those early meetings). No one was really sure if Flash skills would again become marketable.

However, with the releases of Flash 6 and 7, which included more mature and powerful versions of the ActionScript programming language, the mood and the underlying economic dynamics began to change.

More businesses began to use Flash for interactive application development — particularly in the areas of e-commerce, e-learning, multimedia deployment, gaming, and multiuser online experiences. As businesses started to express increased interest in Flash, user group meeting attendance rose, the number of job postings increased, and conferences rebounded.

Advancing careers

In my experience with LA Flash, I know that user groups enable self-sufficient developers, like me, to further their careers in tangible and meaningful ways. As user group attendance improved and membership increased, we started to reap the rewards: members increased their skills and their community involvement, and the community generated more and more value for them.

In one particular case, a Flash developer moved to Los Angeles, immediately joined LA Flash, participated in our study groups, and presented at a meeting. Within an amazingly short period of time, this developer established a network, gained valuable exposure and knowledge, and scored a job at a top agency (Schematic). This is the type of economic activity and value that Flash user groups facilitate every day. I know dozens of people who have found work and obtained jobs because of their involvement in the Flash community.

A new era in Flash history

As we celebrate the tenth anniversary of Flash, we're seeing a whole new era in Flash history, thanks to two main factors: The first is the release Flash 8 in 2005. With its visually expressive effects, a powerful video codec, and massive improvements in rendering performance, Flash 8 enables an entirely new class of rich-media experiences.

The other major factor is the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe. While many in the user community were uncertain about the deal, I saw the acquisition as a positive move for Flash users.

I've always admired Adobe for the quality of its creative authoring tools and its prowess with video. And Adobe is simply a much larger company and therefore able to devote far more resources to support and develop the Flash platform.

Furthermore, with its ubiquitous PDF technology, Adobe has sales channels and inroads that I hope will rapidly accelerate corporate adoption of Flash products and technologies.

After meeting with Macromedia to discuss implications of the acquisition, user group managers around the world devoted entire user group meetings to address uncertainties. Overall, members began to feel more positive about the situation. Now that the merging of the two firms is complete and we're beginning to see the benefits of a combined company, the nature of the community continues to evolve.

In fact, under the management of Ed Sullivan, the Adobe User Group is growing larger and more rapidly than ever before, with more than 350 user groups around the world. The conferences, too, have taken on a renewed dynamism and excitement. FITC Toronto has been amazing for the past two years, as were reports from Flashforward Seattle, MXDU in Australia, and Spark in Holland. Later this year, we'll see two new conferences — FITC Hollywood and Flashforward Austin — as the market for these Flash and rich-media community events expands.

The next ten years

As we embark on the next ten years, Flash — now in the hands of Adobe — has an extraordinarily bright future as the interface for more and more digital information on a continually expanding variety of devices. Already we see tremendous activity on this front with Flash running not only on mobile phones around the world but also on devices as varied as the PlayStation Portable (PSP), the Kodak EasyShare camera, the iRiver Portable Multimedia Player, Samsung SMT-7000 set-top boxes, and even the touchscreen in the Jaguar XK4.

Just as exciting as watching the technology grow into that promise will be participating in the community that makes it happen.

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