Macromedia, Adobe Flash Player and Flash Professional - why is there so many names for this ?

People are often confused concerning Flash, because it's something that usually is there and questions are only starting to arise when it's time to update it or when you start having adobe error messages.

Flash has always been a tricky one to deal with, here is why :

First the name : some people are still looking for a product named "Macromedia Flash" - Well, it isn't there anymore because a few years back (2005) Adobe acquired Macromedia Flash.


In 2005 Flash was a very attractive product, a breakthrough on the web, because without it fancy web developers were only counting on javascript, animated gif and html to do some magic and that wasn't pretty ...

But what really made Flash a Star was the incredible growth of Youtube.

And Adobe still has to provide a free plugin called Adobe Flash Player.
Which by the way isn't provided for some Linux distro, because it's a proprietary application.

Second confusion : What Flash is capable of doing, some users think that because they have Flash downloaded and installed Flash from Adobe website now they can develop their own application or make animation (basically they can generate .swf files)
And that's the second mistake, even if the product has the same name Adobe Flash, what they're downloading is usually already on their computer (otherwise no Youtube)

Because to be able to program you need a way BIGGER application called "Adobe Flash Professional" see http://www.adobe.com/flashplatform/

And obviously this "Adobe Flash Professional" is not Free, there is a trial version though, which is fully functional and offers every feature of the product for you to test-drive during 30 days.
it's here https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index…