In the late 1990s Flash brought multimedia to the web: animation. games, music, video. It had excellent drawing, vector, and programming tools for the time, rivaling the utility of HyperCard and Director.
I started creating Flash when it still called FutureSplash, from FutureWave. It soon became Macromedia Flash. I was active on the "net news" server "news.macromedia.com" and the old Flasher mailing list. I was a Flash 2 Beta program member. I created animations quickly and my work merited a color spread in Flash 2 Web Animation Book (1997).
YouTube's first video player was in Flash. I worked at Slacker Radio and worked on our webplayer, written in Flash. Flash enabled Slacker to serve popular music encrypted so as to keep the music labels happy.
Flash is now famously deprecated.
My site uses Ruffle as a drop in open-source Flash Player written in Rust. It has allowed me to showcase these older files on my site. Ruffle powers archival Flash content on the Internet Archive. I was able to use the JPEXS-Decompiler to make adjustments to the links in these Flash files.
