Adobe Flash provides a powerful suite of multimedia tools for rapid user interface prototyping. Its flexible timeline and movie clip concepts allow designers to quickly capture and test complex interactions. Its ECMAScript-based ActionScript language extends the graphical workflow, allowing for procedural and event-driven designs that would be difficult to execute with Flash’s timeline tools alone. ActionScript is a mature, Object-Oriented language that is even capable of tasks such as basic video processing. However, Flash is far from a complete application development platform. By design, a Flash movie is trapped inside the Flash player—there aren’t many ways in which it can interact with your hardware. Flash is intended for the web and, as such, it has all of the security-related limitations one would expect of an environment that hosts potentially malicious software. Because Flash is otherwise flexible and ubiquitous, one might wish to circumvent these limitations so that Flash may act as a rich UI layer for hardware demonstrations. Luckily, there are several ways of doing so.

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