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Macromedia: Macromedia Flash
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Macromedia was not without its trials during this intense growth period. By 1997, Macromedia was the creator or licenser of several products: the design and development tools Shockwave, Director, Dreamweaver, and Fontographer; the print production platform FreeHand; media players Shockwave Player and Flash; and their learning development application Authorware. But while the stock had reached an all-time high of $63 in 1995, by March 1997 it had plunged 20 percent to $15 before steadily dropping to about $8 a share. The plunge was due to a much-publicized delayed release of Director6 and lagging sales of Macintosh computers. The company reported a loss of $15.3 million for the 1997 fiscal fourth quarter.
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"From the standpoint of integrating the products into a single package, Macromedia is providing developers and designers the tools they need to create more powerful Web sites and Web applications," said Jim Whitney, CTO of Webvertising Inc., in Houston. "Clearly, the goal with integrating these products is to speed production and make it easier to create each of the elements that are needed when developing Web sites. What stands out the most is the integration of Flash MX with ColdFusion MX for application development, because you can completely change the user experience on the Web for the better."
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[O]f all, Macromedia has plenty to gain by owning a browser, OS, office suite, game console, Bill Gates, and much more. Instead of all the constant “partnership” initiatives, Macromedia can simply distribute its Flash and Shockwave Player on virtually every computing platform available without all the hassle (Except for Apple and those open-source guys. This will still take some “partnering”.).
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In October 1998 Macromedia disclosed the Flash Version 3 Specification to the world on its website. It did this in response to many new and often semi-open formats competing with SWF, such as XARA's Flare and Sharp's Extended Vector Animation formats. Several developers quickly created a C library for producing SWF. February 1999 saw the launch of MorphInk 99, the first non-Macromedia or third party program to create SWF files. Macromedia ... hired Middlesoft to create a freely-available developers' kit for the SWF file format versions 3 to 5. Many open and free libraries based on the information released to the public in 1998 and from later study of the SWF file Format, such as the Ming library, exist to produce SWF files on many platforms.
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In addition to Dreamweaver, Macromedia found success in its Flash product. While Shockwave was proving successful in the more-advanced development applications, it was ... too bulky and complicated for ordinary Web use. The company hoped its new Flash product would be the key to streamlining multimedia Web use. Flash was born from a product called FutureSplash Animator, made by FutureWave Software Inc. Macromedia bought the company in January 1997 and incorporated the FutureSplash product into its line, renaming it Macromedia Flash. By again utilizing Sun Microsystems' Java technology, Flash could be used to deliver multimedia on any machine regardless of platform. In 1997, Macromedia teamed up Flash with RealNetworks to produce RealFlash, a client-server streamlining product that enabled full-length presentations with synchronized audio and sound.
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In 1998 Macromedia was convinced that the future of Director lies on the Internet. That's why Macromedia relased a box called Macromedia Director 7 Shockwave Internet Studio. According to Macromedia this version was rebuilt from the ground up. Some of the new features included support for 1000 sprite channels, sprite rotation and skewing, RGB support and embedded fonts and vector shapes. This is the point in time that Director wasn't the favorite kid anymore and Macromedia started to divert more resources away from Director. Flash was the new kid in town and had many more advantages because of its smaller plugin size.
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