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So almost right away, FutureSplash got a huge amount of exposure from some of the web’s heaviest hitters. They wanted to create something akin to a television viewing experience on a certain section of their page, and after doing some research, found that FutureSplash fit the bill. Then, in August of 1996, Microsoft connected with FutureWave to create an embedded player for MSN.com, the default homepage on Internet Explorer. In 1996, there wasn’t a whole lot of competition, so lots of users came to the Netscape site and downloaded the player out of curiosity and to keep on the cutting edge. Just a few months after the release of their FutureSplash player, Netscape added it to their list of featured extensions. The stars kind of aligned for FutureWave on that particular point. So even at the very beginning, adoption by the average web user was key.
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These animations could then be embedded on the web using the FutureSplash Viewer, a cross-platform (at the time meaning Internet Explorer and Netscape) web player that ran animations quickly and kept file-sizes small.īut users had to actually download this player in order to see animations on their browsers. Like SmartSketch, the UI was clean and friendly, and allowed developers to drag and drop animations around. At its core, it was a frame-by-frame animation tool, but even early on it introduced things like tweens and drawing tools.
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The software itself, FutureSplash Animator, allowed designers to lay out animations on a basic timeline, with a small layer of interactivity. FutureWave decided to pull out the animation component of SmartSketch, and rework it into a web animation tool called FutureSplash, released at the end of 1995.įutureSplash was actually two separate, though linked, products. But aside from text editors, there weren’t a whole lot of tools out there for web designers. The World Wide Web, on the other hand, had everyone talking. In the two years it took FutureWave to build out SmartSketch, pen computing had more or less faded away. They come and go, and it can be difficult to predict what’s going to stick around. So right before its first official release, FutureWave added some basic animation capabilities to SmartSketch.īut there’s this thing about trends in the software world. In the first round of testing the product, many users noted that SmartSketch could be a useful tool for animations and rotoscoping. The software attempted to compensate for the less natural feel of a digital stylus by combining quick and easy to use shortcuts with a forgiving and straightforward UI.
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They got to work on SmartSketch, a graphics editor for the Mac that was optimized for pen computers.
The first target for FutureWave was pen computing (literally computers you could operate with a pen or stylus), the latest tech trend.
They connected with Michelle Welsh to help them run marketing, and, in 1993, the three founded FutureWave software. As it happened, Gay had been developing software for Apple computers since high school, working on games and basic graphic editors. Jackson, the group’s organizer, was looking to break into Macintosh software. But from basically the beginning, it’s development has run parallel to the web’s.įlash got started, conceptually, the day that Jonathan Gay met Charlie Jackson at a local Macintosh Users Group. And like many technologies that get caught in the web’s web, it has a rather storied history of its own.
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According The Verge technology portal, which also recommends this emulator, the Internet Archive digital library uses Ruffle to preserve more than 1,000 games and animations on its site.Flash is a definitive part of the web’s history. One of them is Ruffle, an open source Flash Player emulator that enables you to enable older Flash files through a desktop application or a web browser. While the decision to disable Flash Player is not far-fetched - especially given its frequent security gaps - it does jeopardize the preservation of countless old-school games and animations.įortunately, there are many ways to keep your content alive. All modern web browsers have long used more modern standards like HTML5, so the need for Flash Player has largely disappeared. Soon after, increasingly versatile alternatives began to emerge, relegating Flash to the background. However, Apple’s rise in popularity and Steve Jobs’ decision to ban its use in many of its products came as a blow to Adobe. In the previous decade, Flash Player was the central technology for all kinds of services based on web technologies.