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by Alexandra Barrett

(IDG) -- If you're like two-thirds of Web surfers, you can view a website that uses Macromedia's Flash vector image format without first downloading or installing a player. That's because the Flash player is already on your system. At least, that's what market researchers King, Brown & Partners found in a recent study.

What's more, two-thirds of all Web surfers translates into about 100 million people, according to the market researchers. These numbers validate the work Macromedia has done for the past year: "getting the Flash player out there in the hands of Web users," says Kevin Lynch, the company's vice president and general manager of Web publishing. To that end, Macromedia partnered with Microsoft and Apple, which bundle Flash in their operating systems. Also, Netscape includes Flash as part of Netscape Navigator 4.5 and America Online is distributing it with AOL 4.0.

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But Flash's profile among the Web-surfing public is not in keeping with these numbers. Nor is the creative community cognizant of Flash's widespread presence -- and they're Macromedia's target market. Most people do not know that vector image formats like Flash, which use a mathematical formula to describe an image, can use significantly less bandwidth than bitmapped image formats like JPEGs and GIFs, which paint an image on a pixel by pixel basis. Nor do they know that Flash sites have a "very high cool factor," according to Harley Manning, senior analyst with Forrester Research, as demonstrated on sites for Volkswagen's New Beetle and Budweiser's Bud Bowl.

Graphics-website launch

So, Macromedia's current challenge is first to raise Flash's profile and to foster appreciation for vector graphics, Manning says. Ultimately, Macromedia wants to persuade Web developers to use the company's Web publishing tools.

Launching this week on that mission is www.vectorzone.com, a new Macromedia website stocked with graphics resources. It was unveiled this week at Seybold Seminars Boston Publishing '99.

Featured information includes vector basics, interviews with graphic designers, discussions of graphics standards, and other topics of interest mainly to web and graphic design professionals. The site's heavy use of Flash will also appeal to anyone with a taste for innovative graphic design.

And the King, Brown & Partners research showing Flash's wide distribution should make it much easier for Macromedia to sell Web publishers on their Flash products, Manning says, noting, "When someone thinks about using a new tool, one of the questions they ask themselves is 'Will anyone see what I've done?' With these statistics, Macromedia has made that question moot."

Fireworks update to ship out

Macromedia also already has a good reputation among the creative directors of the world, because of its multimedia authoring like Director and Sound Edit. But if it is to succeed in its new mission -- "to bring life to the Web" -- the company really needs to start promoting its Web publishing tools, Manning says. Those include Dreamweaver, an HTML authoring tool; Shockwave, to deliver Director movies over the Web; Fireworks, for bit-mapped Web graphics; and, of course, Flash.

Macromedia will ship this month an update to Fireworks, which it heralds as a bridge between graphics and code in Web development. For example, Fireworks 2 can ripple editing changes across multiple graphics to help keep a site's design consistent.

The update supports graphic and text style guides and new editing functions. It comes with a URL manager to keep links consistent on a site. Its JavaScript behaviors can translate to native behaviors in Dreamweaver. In fact, Macromedia's Web products are available integrated as Dreamweaver Fireworks Studio. Fireworks 2 costs $199; upgrades cost $129; and the Dreamweaver Fireworks Studio, $399. A Dreamweaver update shipped in December, priced at $299. Macromedia's line is available for the Macintosh or for Windows 95/98.

Really, Macromedia has all the makings in place for a complete palette of Web publishing tools.

"Already, you see serious content management system vendors like Broadvision bundling Dreamweaver," Manning points out. "They don't like [Microsoft's] FrontPage or [Allaire's] ColdFusion because they use all sorts of proprietary tags. Dreamweaver, on the other hand, produces very clean HTML, he says.. "And thats very important to the pros."

But professionals aside, why should the end-user care whether Macromedia succeeds in promoting Flash and its family of web publishing tools?

"Users are expecting more, better designed sites on the Web," says Lynch; and Flash promises "great design over low bandwidth."