Why Flash?

Macromedia Flash was chosen as the creation program for the 85349 animations. The reason it was chosen was because of its ease of use, interactivity and small file sizes.

There are a number of ways to view the animations, these are discussed in more detail on the Information about the Animations page. There are two main players for Flash animations, these are RealNetworks RealPlayer, and Macromedia's Shockwave Flash Player. You can download the players from the button links below.

    

Flash 2 is a vector based graphics program, that creates the frames of the animation in vector form. This means that the animation will not only resize with very little or no loss in quality, but also that the Shockwave Flash files are quite small.

Flash provides interactivity in the form of navigation buttons, for start, stop, back, forward and pause. There is no option to speed the animation up or slow it down once the animation has been converted to a Shockwave Flash file.