Macromedia Central was a runtime environment developed by Macromedia (now just Adobe since being acquired) for developing application software that runs on different operating systems and are distributed over the Internet. It is an extension of the Adobe Flash Player, and shares some similarities with the Java Runtime Environment, although it has a much smaller memory footprint and is more suited for vector animation. Macromedia Central's newest version is currently 1.5, released in September 2004.