Adobe Macromedia

Macromedia was an American graphics and web development software house headquartered in San Francisco , California producing such products as Macromedia Flash . The line of Macromedia products is now controlled by its former rival, Adobe Systems , which acquired Macromedia on December 3, 2005.

Macromedia was formed by the 1992 merger of Authorware Inc. (makers of Authorware ) and MacroMind-Paracomp (makers of Macromind Director ).

Director , an interactive multimedia authoring tool widely used to make CD-ROMs and information kiosks, was Macromedia's flagship product until the mid-1990s. As the CD-ROM market began to decline and the World Wide Web gained in popularity, Macromedia created Shockwave , a Director viewer plugin for Web browsers, but decided it also needed to expand its market by branching out into web-native media tools.