Adobe Flash

It was only a few years ago that Adobe Flash, originally Macromedia Flash, was used for creating simple animations to be inserted into websites. It was almost considered a bit of a gimick, websites that contained Flash movies were really just trying to be, well flash.

However it has all changed in recent years as Flash has grown up and become a proper development tool, that means we can now create full applications within Flash rather than simple animations. The key to all of this is its programming language called ActionScript which will be familiar to those developers who have experience with JavaScript.

So what are the big advantages of using Flash? Here are our top advantages:

• It is really good at creating animations within applications, for example if you want to make a list pop-up or a panel float in from the left you can do it far easier in Flash
• The actual application can be embedded into a webpage or run as a Windows, Mac or Linux application without having to create separate versions
• It has excellent skinning abilities - skinning is the ability to change the appearance of a component, such as a button, to make it look exactly as you want. This really makes an application look to have a perceived extra quality
• It runs pretty quickly - the applications don't tend to be that large in size so are easily 'moved around' and have good performance

There are a few downsides in some respects, the largest being the extra skills required to develop Flash solutions, so you are likely to have to pay more to have them developed. However, when used appropriately a Flash based application can really give your solution a huge boost.