Macromedia Central

Macromedia Central was a runtime environment based on Flash Player that had been marketed by Macromedia for developing applications that can be distributed over the internet to run on various operating systems.

Product history
As an extension of Flash Player, Central shares some similarities with the Java Runtime Environment, but with a much smaller memory footprint through the use of vector animation. The last version of Central, 1.5, was released in September 2004.

Macromedia was acquired by Adobe Systems in December 2005. With the release of Adobe AIR, Central became obsolete and is no longer available for download.

Easter egg
A hidden Homestar Runner cartoon, titled "Where the Crap Are We?" could be found by opening the "About Macromedia Central" dialog box, holding down Ctrl (or command on Macintoshes) and double clicking on the logo. This brings up a password entry box. Enter "sbemail" as the password, and the cartoon will play in the dialog box.

Articles

 * Macromedia frees Flash from the browser by David Becker at CNET (2003-03-27)