Macromedia hopes to make its Flash animation player a "first-class citizen" on PCs with a new addition that allows the software to operate outside of a Web browser.

The company is scheduled to announce the planned Flash enhancement and associated services, dubbed Macromedia Central, Thursday morning at its FlashForward developer conference in San Francisco. Tools for developers will be available next month, but consumers won't be able to download the Central software until this summer.

Macromedia last year began a wide-reaching campaign to expand the role of Flash in Web design, promoting the software as a broad platform for designing Web applications and building user interfaces. Macromedia has made noticeable inroads with the push, with many sites rebuilt around Flash, but the Flash experience still has to happen inside a browser window.

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