Jonathan Gay
Jonathan Gay was a co-founder of FutureWave Software in 1993. For a decade, he was the main programmer and visionary of Flash, an animation editor for web pages. He is currently President of Software as Art, a startup working on energy management solutions for the home.
Early Days
While in high school, Gay won a science fair award for programming on an Apple II computer and came to the attention of Silicon Beach Software founder Charlie Jackson. Gay began programming for Silicon Beach his senior year. His first published product, released in 1985, was Airborne!, a black-and-white game for the Macintosh computer. While in college, he collaborated with game designer Mark Pierce and programmed Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle. [1] All three were award-winning programs that included digital sounds.
After graduating from Harvey Mudd College, Gay worked full-time for Silicon Beach Software. During this time he added some significant features to Superpaint 2, including Bezier curves, and began work on IntelliDraw, which was published by Aldus after the acquisition of Silicon Beach Software in 1990.
FutureWave Software
In 1993, Gay and Jackson founded FutureWave Software with the intention of creating graphics software for pen computing, in particular the Penpoint operating system that ran on the EO Personal Communicator. [2]
Gay and programmer Robert Tatsumi finished the company's first product in 1994, SmartSketch, a vector-drawing program. Shortly thereafter, PenPoint was discontinued. SmartSketch was translated to the Windows and Macintosh operating systems, but with the advent in 1995 of the World Wide Web, Gay saw an opportunity to create an editor that could produce animations for web pages. [3]
FutureSplash Animator was released in May, 1996.
Macromedia
When MSN and Disney decided to use FutureSplash Animator for their websites, Macromedia made an offer to buy FutureWave Software and the acquisition was completed in December, 1996. FutureSplash Animator was renamed Flash 1.0. [4]
Gay became a Macromedia Vice President and for the next decade headed up the development effort on Flash at Macromedia. Initially he led the engineering team and wrote code through Flash 4. He then guided the evolution of Flash from an animation engine to a full-featured multimedia runtime and application platform.
Gay also led the team that developed the Flash Media server and implemented video in Flash. This work provided the technology infrastructure that has enabled innovations with web video at sites such as YouTube and NBC.com.
By 2001, there were 50 people working on Flash, 500,000 developers were using it and over 325 million people had the Flash player that worked with their web browsers. [5] In 2007, a survey found that the Flash player was installed on 96% of Internet-enabled desktops worldwide and was used by over 2 million people. [6]
When Gay left Macromedia in 2006, he held the title of Chief Technology Officer.