Several major computer animation applications and multimedia formats have appeared (and disapeared) over the past two decades. In the dawn of interactive multimedia, Apple's Hypercard format was popular among artists needing to pack sound, bitmap graphics and hypertext into a small package. The small "stacks" fit easily onto a floppy and tranferred quickly over 2400 bps modems, and were viewable with the freely distributed Hypercard Player. By today's standards, however, Hypercard stacks offered limited options for animation and all but tiny looping sound bites.

Next, Macromind (later to become Macromedia and then purchased by Adobe) Director quickly rose to become the most popular multimedia content creation tool. Director featured sophisticated time-based animation, complex interactivity, and advanced sound handling capabilities. Director movies could be saved as self-running projectors, but tended to be very large. Coinciding with the growth of interest in Director was the proliferation of affordable CD-ROM drives. Numerous entertainment, fine art and education titles were released on CD-ROM — artists were no longer constrained by slow modem connections or small floppies.

QuickTime, an innovative and revolutionary technology from Apple, became the standard for multi-platform digital video delivery. Working at the system level, QuickTime enables different applications to take advantage of the same suite of video authoring componts. QuickTime supports many major video, sound and interactive formats on the Mac, PC and Unix platforms, including .mov, .swf, .avi, .mpeg, .aiff, and .wav.

Originally developed by a third party as FutureSplash, Flash is Macromedia's (now Adobe's) response to the rise in popularity of the World Wide Web. The demand for dynamic content on the Web has forced a return to the consideration of bandwidth. Unlike CD-ROM content, files delivered over the Web must be optimizing for fast downloading with slow modems, and made viewable on many platforms on different browsers. Flash's Small Web File (.swf) accomplishes this by exploiting the small size and scalability of vector artwork.