Flash has come a long way since Ad.WRIGHT! started using it 7 years ago when we were still using versions flash 3 and 4. Back then styles and innovators were being created and most are still around today.
Flash became famous for the classic 'FLASH INTRO' which as we all know, was great in the beginning, but after you had seen one, you felt like you had seen them all. Plus Flash content was still affected by those terrible internet connections we had, hard to believe we had 33 and 56k modems (I remember less coming from the ZX81 era). I believe bandwidth was still a problem right up until recently, broadband has really changed the internet full stop, or rather global broadband. Not having to worry about keeping a file size below 50k changes how you build your applications.
Now we are in the Web 2.0 era and broadband is pretty much universally accepted as a standard connection to the internet, Flash has made a comeback in so many ways. The first being the penetration of the flash plug in, they managed to get a near seamless auto update function so in our tests and stats, near 98 - 99% are using the latest versions. This means that there is no worry over actually having flash in the first place and even whether it is of the correct version (another old headache).
Another mile stone was video to Flash conversion and compression, allowing web sites like the now famous YouTube.com This one web site and many others (MetaCafe,Blinkx) have literally changed our social behaviour when it comes to entertainment, many will spend their weekends in front of the computer and YouTube instead of the TV. And talking of TV, we now have 'virtual TV' which utilise flash technology.
One of the final tipping points is the numerous technology advances revolving around the Flash platform that is now available, these include advanced video compression TrueMotion VP6, the Flash player 9 and ActionScript 3.0 which is the programming language used to create all those weird and wonderful effects we have become accustomed to. The difference between Player 7 and 9 is simply a mile apart.
When you add these together, it means we are seeing advances only limited by imagination (and budget), its now all about usability and making applications 'just work' and having great 'user experiences'.
What's next? A bit of convergence it seems with more use of Web 2.0 techniques and Adobe Air for us developers to make use of the skills we already have, allowing a powerful combination of not only programming in different languages but also run time on any platform, including mobile. Flash is starting to creep in to Java's space with much easier to build desktop, mobile and web applications.
