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  Flash Basics :
FLASH vs ANIMATED GIFs








An animated GIF is actually many images saved in one.

When the animated GIF is loaded onto a webpage, the browser simply loops the images. This means, if you make an animation of a clown that moves his hand up and down in 25 small movements, then the animated area of the image is saved 25 times. So it doesn't take a lot of animation to create a GIF image that's remarkable bigger than a regular clown image.

Therefore, even small animations take forever to load.




While animated GIFs can be used for animations, they do not support interactivity. They simply loop images in a predefined order and that's it.

In Flash, you can control the animations. For example, you can make the animation stop and wait for the user to click a button. And when the animation starts again it can be dependant on which button was clicked.




A final obvious difference is that GIF images are limited to a 256 color palette.




So compared to animated GIFs, the advantages of Flash are that:
  • Flash movies load much faster.

  • Flash movies allow interactivity.

  • Flash movies can use more than 256 colors.


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DEVELOPER TIP!
FACT:
It takes about half a second for a server to respond to a request sent via the internet.
TIP:
If your page has 10 very small images - each with a size of 100 bytes - it will take longer to load than had it been a continuous stream of 1000 bytes.





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