Adobe Flash Player is an application that lets you watch multimedia content developed in Flash in a wide range of web browsers. Interactive animations, games, flash documents, videos or music are just a few examples of the type of content you'll have access to with Adobe Flash Player. The application also supports SWF format, used by programs like Adobe Flash or Flex.

Whether they’re based on vector graphics or images, Flash Player is able to play the animations through ActionScript, the programming language used by those formats. Additionally, Adobe's multimedia player is currently supported by pretty much all web browsers: Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera. The application's name changed to Adobe Flash Player after Macromedia was acquired by Adobe

Adobe Flash Player is just a multimedia player; to develop Flash apps, check out other programs like the previously mentioned Adobe Flash CS3 Professional or Adobe Flex.