Free Flash Online Greetings

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A greeting card is an illustrated, folded card featuring an expression of friendship or other sentiment. Although greeting cards are usually given on special occasions such as birthdays, Christmas or other holidays, they are also sent to express thanks or other care. Greeting cards, usually packaged with an envelope, come in a variety of styles, are manufactured as well as hand-made by hundreds of companies big and small. These days, greeting cards with die-cuts or glued on decorations may cost up to five dollars each.

An e-card is similar to a postcard or greeting card, with the primary difference being it is created using digital media instead of paper or other traditional materials. E-cards are made available by publishers usually on various Internet sites, where they can be sent to a recipient, usually via e-mail.

E-cards are digital "content", which makes them much more versatile than traditional greeting cards. For example unlike traditional greetings, e-cards can be easily sent to many people at once or extensively personalized by the sender. Conceivably they could be saved to any computer or electronic device or even viewed on a television set, however E-card digital content has not yet progressed as far as digital video or digital audio in terms of varied usage.

Typically an e-card sender chooses from an on-line catalog of e-cards made available on a publisher's web site. After selecting a card, the sender can personalize it to various degrees by adding a message, photo, or video. Finally the sender specifies the recipient's e-mail address and the web site delivers an e-mail message on behalf of the sender to the recipient.

E-card technology has improved significantly since 1996 around the time of their inception. One technical aspect that has remained mostly contstant is the delivery mechanism: The e-mail received by the recipient contains not the e-card itself, but an individually coded link back to the publisher's web site that displays sender's card exactly as it was originally configured.

Flash animation
This type of e-card is based on two-dimensional vector animation controlled with a scripting language. The format is proprietary to Adobe, however, widespread usage of Adobe's software allows this type of card to be easily viewed on most of today's computers. The recipient sees an animated short usually 15-30 seconds in duration. The animation often appears to have a cartoon style due to the nature of the content, however, some Flash creations can be quite sophisticated and realistic. A sound track usually accompanies the animation which may contain speech or music.

Flash animated greeting cards can include interactivity, for example, asking the viewer to choose a picture to animate, however, most Flash e-cards are designed to convey the sentiment of the sender through simple observation.

Flash animated cards are offered today by almost all major e-card publishers and are consequently the most common format used.