Although Flash was intended as a tool for delivering high-impact, low-bandwidth, vector animations for the web, Flash can also create a stand-alone executable version of any Flash movie (SWF file). These executables are called projectors because they play movies. The original intent was to allow people to send portfolios or examples of their work to someone who did not have the Flash player installed.

Flash is a powerful animation and presentation tool but it was designed for the web and for security reasons Macromedia correctly placed limitations on what it could do. The same limitations that make Flash content safe for people to run from the web make it somewhat clumsy in a desktop environment.

Flash runs inside a black box (the Flash player) completely cut off from the outside world except for a small hole, the FSCommand actionScript, that Macromedia provides for communications with browser based scripting languages like VBScript and JavaScript.

Over the years, third party products have emerged to extened the functionality of Flash projectors. Most of these products

wrapped the projector in another EXE file that modified the projector to achieve effects desired by the Flash community, some of the most popular being: removing the title bar, suppressing the context menu (and Macromedia copyright information), changing the projector icon from the Flash default, making the projector draggable, changing the shape of the projector window and running the projector as a screensaver.

Many third party products are able to extend the functionality of Flash projectors by exploiting a Flash 5 undocumented feature, the 'SAVE' fscommand feature, which has been disabled in the latest version, Flash MX.
With the addition of ActionScript, Flash became an excellent tool for creating rich user interfaces, only it's lack of access to the hardware kept it tied to the web. The idea behind the third-party products, and this Extending Flash web site, is to allow Flash developers to leverage their knowledge of Flash to break into markets that they wouldn't otherwise have access to - desktop applications, CD-ROM navigation systems and screensavers.

We hope you enjoy learning about and using the utilities provided on this site, and we wish you every success in extending Flash into new markets in the future.