Things to know about Adobe Flash

• Adobe Flash movies can now be cached by the Google search engine. Try searching “filetype:swf (replace this text with your keyword)” in Google after remove double quotes and braces.
• Adobe Flash movies can also be used for slide shows and presentations with some fantabulous effects for a true multimedia experience.
• The Adobe company acquired Macromedia (alongwith its complete line of products including Macromedia Flash, Dreamweaver, etc.) in December 2005.
• Adobe Flash movies can display random data, or retrieve it from the databases, using XML files and interactivity, like user input and browsing criteria, can also be added into them.
• Macromedia introduced Flash, then Splash, in the year 1996 and today you would find Adobe Flash Player on over 98% of the Internet enabled PCs & laptops.
• Approximately 75% of online videos worldwide are views using Adobe’s Flash technology which make it the undisputed #1 format for videos on the Internet.
• Adobe Flash has been written in C++ language and supports languages such as Action Script, C, C++, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby.
• Adobe Flash can manipulate vector as well as raster graphics and also supports bidirectional streaming of both audio and video.
• Microsoft introduced Silverlight in the year 2007 in competition to Adobe Flash which has seen been used in streaming 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics and 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. W3C’s SVG and SMIL standards are also seen as closest competitors to Adobe Flash.
• Adobe Flash Player best performs on Windows platform than on Mac OSX & Linux platforms.
• Steve Jobs has openly criticized the stability of Flash, calling it a buggy software and saying that “..when one of Apple’s Macintosh computers crashes, ‘more often than not’, the cause can be attributed to Flash.”