This ain’t your daddy’s Flash
I was having a discussion with someone today who said, in no uncertain terms, that he despises Flash. I found myself taking that in an odd sort of personal way. He doesn’t like some of the “crap” that he sees out there and some of the sites that are just clunky and overloaded with “non-functional movement” and “pointless animations.” As we in the Flash community know, Flash has long been more than just a tool to create pointless little animations. It has grown in so many ways that I can’t even start to list them here. I started explaining some of the magical powers of ActionScript and thumbed through a couple of my books with him to show him just a few strengths. [Quick book plug… Foundation ActionScript Animation: Making Things Move! by Keith Peters (awesome!)] Anyway, after showing and explaining to him where Flash has gone over the years, I think I turned him completely around (that, or he just wanted to get away from me).
I think that for those of us who work/build/create with Flash, that kind of thing can be very frustrating to hear from someone. So frustrating for me that I felt the need to write this post about the subject right away. I feel that a part of my responsibilities as a Flash Developer is to inform others outside of the Flash community about these kind of things. The problem I find myself running into is that it’s hard to engage people in that conversation if they are not in the field. Take this post for example. I can type until I’m blue in the… um… fingers, but who’s reading this? Most likely, people in the Flash community who already know all about this issue and frustration. To that end, I think I’m going to do some brainstorming to find ways to get this information outside of the Flash talking groups and into the world of the people I’ll go ahead and call “civilians” because I like to use that word to describe “other” people.
I’m not sure how I’m going to do it. I’m not sure where I’m going to do it. I really don’t know who will even listen, but I’m going to get the word out if I have to tie people down to chairs in conference rooms and give them hour-long presentations on the extreme power that Flash has grown into. At least that’s what I WANT to do. Hopefully, I won’t end up giving up just to go sit on the couch and wait for the next episode of “Lost.”
February 24th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
yep…you’re right. the term “RIA” has been around a lot longer than “AJAX” but which one gets more press? maybe they rightly get more press, because when companies like google and yahoo come up with their sexy new apps, look at what they’re using. We need a serious top of the line, leader of the field app in flash (or more likely flex) to get some serious press, so the corporate world will take notice. Yeah, there’s a lot of awesome RIA’s out there, but none with the popularity of a gmail, or even close.
February 24th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
After 5 years of developing web applications with Flash I’m considering the benefits of AJAX, which I still consider as javascript, xml, html, css. The reason is I see where macromedia strategists, err Adobe Flash Plaaaatform strategist are taking us and I don’t like it. I feel pressured to continue upgrading my Flash development tools, now I see that in order to produce competitive flash applications I’ll need to also put Flex in my arsenal of tools. So, every designer and engineer on my staff will now have to buy Flash AND Flex in order to create a good workflow. That just doesn’t fit a small businesses budget. So we schedule about 20% of our time switching to Linux now and selecting or developing production tools and a workflow that is more affordable, flexible, and replaceable with non-proprietary heavily patented technologies. That’s a lot of rant for a simple statement. Despite how much I do like what we’ve done with Flash, we’re discovering cheaper better ways to do the same things without it.
February 24th, 2006 at 2:49 pm
I agree completely - and I feel the best thing to do is, as they say, “eat your own dog food”. Use Flash to make applications, and make them visible. Turn the Flash haters around through action as well as words by creating apps that people can’t help using, they are so cool.
February 24th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
1. Thanks for the plug!
2. I don’t really worry too much about the anti-flash crowd. There is more than enough work out there to keep any decent Flash developer busy 80+ hours per week, and it only seems to be increasing. So they can howl about how horrible Flash is while I’m going to the bank to deposit my checks.
February 24th, 2006 at 4:58 pm
Nice points guys. I’ve been thinking more about this and I don’t think it’s about making Flash haters like Flash, I think it’s more about changing the way people think about Flash and about helping people understand that what they want can more than likely be built in Flash. I agree with you, Mike, that building more and more apps is one approach. And Keith, amen on the work being plentiful! As for the AJAX stuff: the press it has received does far outweigh that of Flash/Flex. And maybe it will, in fact, take someone building a huge Flash/Flex app that a big company like Google will pick up on. But how to get them to pick up on it? I see people post about some pretty sweet apps they’ve built but how do we, as Flash Developers, push those apps to the top outside the Flash communities?
Keith - No problem on the plug. Thanks for your great work on the book!
February 24th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
[…] 5:49 pm This post at FlashCanon and this article at designtechnica about 2006’s best of web 2.0 (wow best of 2006 already…its friggin february!) had me all set to write up a “Where are all the RIAs?” post…point being the sexy AJAX apps seem to be getting all the press and visibilty, and maybe rightly so. Then I read this comment on the post at FlashCanon by Keith Peters that put it all in perspective: I don’t really worry too much about the anti-flash crowd. There is more than enough work out there to keep any decent Flash developer busy 80+ hours per week, and it only seems to be increasing. So they can howl about how horrible Flash is while I’m going to the bank to deposit my checks. […]
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