Macromedia Pushes Flash For All Things Web 751
nakhla writes: "This article at News.com details how Macromedia is expanding its Flash product to be more of an all-in-one web solution. Rather than relying on HTML codes to design web pages and embedding Flash as one component, Macromedia wants Flash to be used to design the entirety of a site. Pre-built components, such as scrollbars and buttons, are included to allow designers to write everything using the new Flash product. With websites becoming more and more complex, and the trend to move towards providing web services rather than application software, could something like this be the answer? The article also mentions how Macromedia is on a campaign to have its Flash plugin included in all Internet-compatible devices. How long before we see a Qt based plugin for the Qtopia handheld project?"
Have any of you seen what this does? (Score:0, Informative)
Of course I haven't seen everything that these flash-sites can do, or will do, but I approve so far.
not quite (Score:2, Informative)
Nothing new, still has the same problems (Score:3, Informative)
The problems are nothing you wouldn't expect -- Requires high bandwidth
Inaccessible to people with disabilities [addressed in part with today's release, but not enough.]
Doesn't usually lead to usable sites. Flash sites are usually too complicated and too cool-looking, not designed for actual people but for marketing droids.
Requires specialized Flash knowledge -- not built on other open products, like XML.
And, most important for this audience -- Flash isn't an open standard. You can't depend on being able to watch it on any given operating system or browser.
Instead, consider some of the "new" offerings from the W3C. Technologies like SMIL and SVG have the potential to overtake Macromedia and make life easier for all of us.
Re:Not gonna happen (Score:5, Informative)
We actually use Flash to develop "Smart Graphics" which are representations of aircraft panels that can then be embedded in Authorware, HTML, Visual Basic, etc... and configured through text files on the fly. This saves us an incredible amount of development time and leaves us with a cross platform library of reuseable objects.
In addition to this Flash is also being used by several companies as a way to create and distribute CBT. I have actually seen one group that developed a shell in Flash with other Flash movies that loaded depending on the content that was needed for the training application.
I think that the fact that Flash is also available on many different platforms makes it a great tool for that type of development. There are many people that I have spoken with at various conferences that believe that the future of the internet is NOT the browser. Flash is at least one viable alternative.
No, I wouldn't develop all of my applications with it, but I think with a little work you can actually use it to develop some very usable programs.
Kris
Re:Flash & Accessibility? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Flash versus open standards (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Flash versus open standards (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Flash & Accessibility? (Score:4, Informative)
Here's what Macromedia has about it on their site:
"Macromedia Flash Player 6 now supports assistive technologies such as screen readers through support of Microsoft Active Accessibility. In addition, Macromedia Flash MX now integrates tools for creating accessible content. To add descriptive text to animations and user interface elements, select an item and enter the appropriate description. Users with disabilities will be able to experience your content. "
you can link to specific scenes in Flash... (Score:2, Informative)
Most of the Flash done for websites is created by Graphic Designers (usually print media designers that have decided (or been made) to create a website) and they don't think this way.
Re:Flash versus open standards (Score:3, Informative)
I deal with this everyday (Score:2, Informative)
I'm the tech guy on a project to put some Arabic courses on the web. While I understand why our design people (I used to be one... back in the day) want to use Flash for EVERYTHING, it just doesn not fit our needs.
Yes, it looks better than HTML. Yes, it can be integreated with JavaScript, PHP, XML. But two big problems still linger (for us, anyway):
What we do use Flash for is display of certain animated graphics. For example, I wrote an XML/JavaScript activity that can teach how to tell time in any language. Basically, the script chooses a random time and then passes it to the XML for translation into the foreign language, and also into a function that displays an analog clock with that same time.
For now, that clock is displayed in Flash. Perhaps later we will use XML SVC, or something like that. But the key is that we are using Flash as a removable part.
Someone already mentioned braille access, etc. I'll just echo that concern.
Re:"Flash" is a good name for the product (Score:4, Informative)
Moderation -1: He talked positively about a Microsoft product.
Re:Just how flexible is flash? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Just how flexible is flash? (Score:2, Informative)
OK, Folks (addressing the Flash-haters) (Score:5, Informative)
Flash is not perfect, and it has been abused quite a bit. However, most of you are ignorant of its capabilities, largely because you've never seen them used.
First of all, Flash can be made accessible. The latest version will work with screen readers, and on top of that, you've obviously heard the annoying music in some of them -- do you suppose that audio could be used to read the screen?
Second, Flash does have its place. I'm a programmer for an educational software company, and let me tell you -- it's just about the only thing educational software companies are using these days, with the exception of slower, more bloated Macromedia formats like Director and Authorware. It's relatively fast, and the small file sizes make a HUGE difference when content is delivered via Internet.
Third -- the "usability" whiners. No, you can't use the back button, and that's a good thing when you're talking about instruction. Did you give a wrong answer? Well oops, I guess you just hit the back button and do it again -- that sounds like a really bad way to give tests to me. As for "deep" linking, you may or may not be able to. It has been possible to load a Flash movie using a query string that sets variables within the movie, e.g. "marketing_crap.swf?section=FAQ", which could be used for navigation into that section.
Lastly, Flash is open. You can download the SDK from Macromedia's site. It explains the file format, internal data types, plus low and high level interfaces for creating SWF files with Visual C++. I understand that it is not as cutesy as the overbuilt XML-type SVG format, but for many people, that isn't a Bad Thing®.
Flash MX Site (Score:3, Informative)
It is a reservation system for the Broadmoor resort in Colorado Springs. I think it is one of the most usable Flash sites I've seen in a while.
Re:Not gonna happen (Score:2, Informative)
Flash is great...but... (Score:3, Informative)
From what I see flash lacks:
- Uniform Printing ability
- Search functionality
- Basic navigation (forward/back)
I'm sure some flash developers can add this to theirs, but the problem still exists in that a user cannot fully control what he is seeing. For example, a flash site may only want you to see the information in order. When you hit back on this site, it doesn't go to the last screen, but to the beginning or somewhere else.Hey..maybe this is how the media is going to control the web...
Re:Just how flexible is flash? (Score:3, Informative)
It also allows you to create persistant connections so that you can PUSH content to the client as well as have the client data PULL. That kind of technology makes it perfect for community sites.
Flash has state. 'Nuff said. (Score:3, Informative)
We built a site that lets users browse through sections of a catalog; a single "wrapper" Flash holds all of the different sections, but they dynamically built from a script, so the user only downloads the sections they're interested in. Product detail "pages" are also dynamically generated by querying the commerce site's database. The result is a well-designed, very flexible interface that is still highly "boiler-plate" from the IS department's perspective, and gives us much more control over the presentation than HTML ever would.
And we didn't even use the XML hooks! (There wasn't time to do the engineering on the e-commerce server/db). Flash isn't the answer to everything, but it is a lot more than just, well, flash.
I'd throw in an URL, but the client would strangle us if they were slash-dotted.
Re:There are open standards... (Score:3, Informative)
Gee, imagine that - a company released the details of their proprietary format just so other people could write tools.
The only product that I have ever seen produce SVG files is Illustrator. Show me some other tools (Windows based, please) and I might think about it.
Fla$h is expen$ive (Score:3, Informative)
No Offense, but did you even bother reading the feature set for the newest version of flash. [It now offers named anchors and accessibility].
Missing from that feature list:Flash is BAD for text (Score:3, Informative)
I cannot use my keyboard to scroll around through the text.
Oh sure those features (well at least keyboard functionality) COULD be added to individual flash animations, but why? Seriously now, each movie would have to independently implement these features, oh joy, like that is ever going to happen.
When such features are reliant upon the OS the system works the same across EVERYTHING that is viewed.
Not to mention that Flash is unwieldy when you only need to, say, oh, put up an image gallery. See my site. Simple. It works in Lynx. (I know, I tried it. The tables degrade very gracefully).
How well does Flash work for the handicapped? The blind, those who cannot see well, or anybody who just wants to have a site read to them from their computer while they are out in the kitchen fetching a snake. Yah sure those people ARE the minority, but as digital voice syntheses gets better and better more and more people will begin to use such virtual web page readers.
Of course OCR could be ran on all the text, but, uh. . . After a certain point, you just have to ask yourself. If your web site consists of text and pictures, why in the HELL Would you want to use a delivery method that is built first and foremost around graphic content delivery? That is like saving all of your text as GIFs, and that went out of style LOOONG ago. (Remember when n00bs used to do that? ^_^
Of course Flash can deliver text at a significantly lower size then a GIF file can, but it is still insane. Flash offers nothing to the majority of sites out there on the net. Think about it, how would Slashdot look as a Flash site? This is ignoring that Flash demands high levels of anti-aliasing to make anything look good. (though granted Flash does INDEED look good, more on this later.)
Then there is the matter of screen resolution.
You see the LOVELY thing about flash is that IN THEORY you can scale it to ANY resolution and, besides from any JPEG or other bitmap images embedded into it, the graphics will look just as good. (or bad. ^_^ )
Too bad WAAAY to many FRIGGIN IDIOTS decide to RESTRICT the size of their Flash animations. Oh lovely. Anybody on a 1600x1200 monitor who comes across a Flash animation in a browser window that is hard locked at 320x240 must have such a LOVELY time...
(this can be bypassed of course by viewing the page's source and going to the flash file directly, but it still is not all that nice...)
So one of flash's most lovely features is almost completely obliterated by user stupidity. Lovely.
(by comparison, few web sites place a lock on the size of their main site page, thankfully... )
In conclusion. Flash is overweight for general usage, has too high of a processor requirement for general usage, is platform dependent, requires IDEs to develop in (though I guess if you were REALLY patient. . . . . hmm, Flash was NOT made to be user editable on the text level though, HTML was) and has a nifty "run file on users computer" 'feature' that I really don't like. . . .
Flash _IS_ good for some things. Xiao Xiao rock . But taking 400mhz+ to render a page full of text? Noooo thanks. (ok 266mhz+ if the page is done properly. But you know how friggin EASY it is to screw up a movie and bloat the heck out of the size and kill all performance? Even for still scenes. . . . Flash is way to easy to make a costly mistake in. Bad HTML won't slow your system down to a crawl, though if your browser is feeling naughty it may crash.
flash 6 has compression support (Score:2, Informative)
HTML+SVG as an alternative to Flash (Score:3, Informative)
I pretty much agree (Score:3, Informative)
The pages are about much the same stuff. When I looked at his sites, everything was flash and javascript linking while mine simply provide *useful content* with relatively vanilla HTML. When I told him this, he looked at me like I didn't know what I was talking about and insisted that I must have some secret tags which the search engines use. I don't even use the meta description tags.
As a result, my pages get 10 hits for every one his get.
Some people are just too dumb to give advice to.