As one of founding members of Flashkit and a part of Flash from the very beginning this is truly a sad day. My heart is heavy in the sense that this journey has finally come to its end. What started with mad excitement and made many fortunes is now finally being put to rest at least as far as within the context of html and the browser.

As I muse all the memories from hard to believe 23 years now it is amazing all the advancements that have been realized because of this simple program. Flash provided me a career, a platform to both learn and teach from and most importantly friendships that have stood the test of time. We built a crazy wonderful community that made a difference for so many people.

Flash was and is still a magical tool that transformed the web from a bunch of animated gifs or clunky java applets to a fully immersive experience. it provided anyone with the imagination and determination to create stunning experiences that entertained, enriched and inspired a generation of developers, gammers and artists of what things could be. Flash at the time could scale screen sizes, work in any browser and allowed a standardized language to a truly wild wild west environment of html and browser wars. But the very thing it provided would become its own undoing.

i'm thankful that Johnathan Gay started Future Splash which I briefly used and that Macromedia bought it and rolled Flash 2 out in 1997. I am truly thankful for Mark Fennel who founded Flashkit and allowed me to lead this community in the early days. Thank you Lynda for the opportunity to share at the Flash Forward conferences, the Team at e-rain maker of Swift 3D, the folks at Friends of Ed, Peach Pit, Pearson, etc. for the chance to be an author. Macromedia and Adobe who gave me the chance to help shape Flash back in the day. Flash truly changed my life gave me a voice and a platform to speak from. But the greatest gifts i received were all the people I got to know in the community. If I tried to list all the people Flashkit brought to me and me to them would take days. Thank you for sharing your vision, knowledge and passion with me, I only hope I did provided the same to many of you.

This is the end of a truly revolutionary period of human communication history. Some people may laugh at that but in time people will come to understand just how revolutionary and special this time was. The explosion that was Flash was the stuff of dreams. I am so glad I got to be a small part of it along with you. Thanks for everything.

Macromedians 1:1 - In the beginning the web was without shape and color, and the hype covered the darkness of the net. Then there was a Flash and life came to the web and vision became reality.