I am reading this book Professional Adobe Flex 2 and found an interesting topic here which i would like to put on my blog. How the most revolutionary flash player comes into existence. Here is the story

In May 1996, a small company named FutureWave Software released a product that is called FutureSplash Animator. FutureSplash was released as a browser extension using the new plug-in API from Netscape. Ironically, FutureWave attempted to sell its technology to Adobe, but at the time, Adobe wasn’t interested. Macromedia was interested in FutureSplash, and, in December 1996, acquired FutureWave Software. Macromedia renamed FutureSplash as Flash Player 1.0.

Following is a timeline of key events in the history of the flash player:

• 1997 – FutureSplash is rennamed and released as Macromedia Flash 1.0
• 1997 – Flash 2 adds buttons, the Library, sound support and color tweens
• 1998 – Flash 3 adds new animations and alpha transparency
• 1999 – Flash 4 adds MP3 audion streaming and motion tweens
• 1999 – 100-millionth download of the flash player
• 2000 – Flash 5 adds ActionScript 1
• 2000 – Flash player installs reach the 92 percent penetration mark
• 2002 – Flash player adds support for Flash remoting, Web services, video, shared libraries, and components
• 2003 – Flash player 7 introduces ActionScript 2.0 and streaming audio and video
• 2005 – Flash player 8 adds filter effects, GIF and PNG images, bitmap caching, new video codec(ON2 VP6), file upload and downloading and FlashType
• 2006 – Flash Player 9 is released and introduces Actionscript 3, E4X XML parsing, regular expression, and binary sockets.

Flash player 9 also includes better memory utilization, improved application initiation speed, as well as improvements in the debugger and error reporting.

© Wrox (WILEY)