Oh the irony! Totally agree with patrick's point above, the fact that your audio boo plays back via Flash is utterly priceless.
Paul, I listen to your blog regularly and agree with most of what you say, but on this I couldn't agree less with you on pretty much all of your points. The biggest thing still in Flash's favour is that clients demand the wow factor! The cost to build that wow experience in any other technology outweighs Flash more or less 2 to 1 in my experience. Sure, in your idealistic world without any cross browser limitations, we'd all use jQuery for our animation needs and there'd be no problems, but dude, wake up, we don't live in a perfect world! Clients have budgets and they demand the wow factor, it’s not always about rolling out just another site which looks like any other boring Web 2.0 templated WordPress blog – where’s the imagination in that?
Most if not all accessibility problems can be solved in Flash with things like swfObject and you really shouldn't tarnish us hardworking responsible Flash developers with the kind of misconceptions that were commonly held in the bad old days of Flash 5. There may well be the odd Flash developer out there still churning out dross but that could be said of any web technology.
Flash and particularly the Flex Framework is a fantastic technology and at the cutting edge there's stuff that you simply couldn't do with anything else, take papervision for example.
I for one will not be moving away from Flash anytime soon, but thank you for re-igniting this thorny issue which we all thought was put to bed about 3 or 4 years ago.
I'm afraid many large companies still use flash to provide a heavy media rich environment. You only have to take a look the the latest sites on TheFWA.com to see that. In the digital marketing arena, Flash is still very much the current thing to use if you want to provide that 'brand experience' to your users.
I'm sorry I disagree. Yes Flash is resource heavy, Yes if you have multiple Flash ad banners you can kill a user's computer, and yes it has been one of the banes of my life as a developer, but HTML 5 (and for that matter some CSS3) hasn't got wide enough browser support yet.
I've found in test that IE8 doesn't support it, Firefox has some rendering issues although some of it works, and Chrome is a little patchy too.
My opinion is you can't develop a website into a dictatorship, forcing users to upgrade or install a new browser for HTML5 support. Doing so just alienates users or even confuses and angers the less tech savvy ones. The average Joe isn't a computer genius, and doesn't often switch or upgrade his/her browser unless the OS tells them to do so, or does it for them.
Just because Mr Jobs is gunning for Flash and won't support it on the iPhone or iPad, something I think is narrow minded and short sighted, doesn't mean we should all bury Flash like many developers and designers did with IE6. It all seems too much like a witch hunt just because Steve "Witch Hunter General" Jobs said.
It would be nice to see that back of Flash one day, or at least a less resource hungry version in months/years to come. But for the foreseeable future, flash isn't going anywhere.
Flash bashing when you are a frequent audioboo user kind of reminds me of when Steve Jobs told people at MacWorld 1997 not to boo Bill Gates at the same time as the wanted Microsoft Office on the Mac.
And I also think enterprise want to run Java applications deploy them through an application store or through a browser. See javafx.com
peter_pilgrim over 3 years ago
Oh the irony! Totally agree with patrick's point above, the fact that your audio boo plays back via Flash is utterly priceless.
Paul, I listen to your blog regularly and agree with most of what you say, but on this I couldn't agree less with you on pretty much all of your points. The biggest thing still in Flash's favour is that clients demand the wow factor! The cost to build that wow experience in any other technology outweighs Flash more or less 2 to 1 in my experience. Sure, in your idealistic world without any cross browser limitations, we'd all use jQuery for our animation needs and there'd be no problems, but dude, wake up, we don't live in a perfect world! Clients have budgets and they demand the wow factor, it’s not always about rolling out just another site which looks like any other boring Web 2.0 templated WordPress blog – where’s the imagination in that?
Most if not all accessibility problems can be solved in Flash with things like swfObject and you really shouldn't tarnish us hardworking responsible Flash developers with the kind of misconceptions that were commonly held in the bad old days of Flash 5. There may well be the odd Flash developer out there still churning out dross but that could be said of any web technology.
Flash and particularly the Flex Framework is a fantastic technology and at the cutting edge there's stuff that you simply couldn't do with anything else, take papervision for example.
I for one will not be moving away from Flash anytime soon, but thank you for re-igniting this thorny issue which we all thought was put to bed about 3 or 4 years ago.
the_lar over 3 years ago
I'm afraid many large companies still use flash to provide a heavy media rich environment. You only have to take a look the the latest sites on TheFWA.com to see that. In the digital marketing arena, Flash is still very much the current thing to use if you want to provide that 'brand experience' to your users.
webade over 3 years ago
I'm sorry I disagree. Yes Flash is resource heavy, Yes if you have multiple Flash ad banners you can kill a user's computer, and yes it has been one of the banes of my life as a developer, but HTML 5 (and for that matter some CSS3) hasn't got wide enough browser support yet.
I've found in test that IE8 doesn't support it, Firefox has some rendering issues although some of it works, and Chrome is a little patchy too.
My opinion is you can't develop a website into a dictatorship, forcing users to upgrade or install a new browser for HTML5 support. Doing so just alienates users or even confuses and angers the less tech savvy ones. The average Joe isn't a computer genius, and doesn't often switch or upgrade his/her browser unless the OS tells them to do so, or does it for them.
Just because Mr Jobs is gunning for Flash and won't support it on the iPhone or iPad, something I think is narrow minded and short sighted, doesn't mean we should all bury Flash like many developers and designers did with IE6. It all seems too much like a witch hunt just because Steve "Witch Hunter General" Jobs said.
It would be nice to see that back of Flash one day, or at least a less resource hungry version in months/years to come. But for the foreseeable future, flash isn't going anywhere.
TheDJBook over 3 years ago
Flash bashing when you are a frequent audioboo user kind of reminds me of when Steve Jobs told people at MacWorld 1997 not to boo Bill Gates at the same time as the wanted Microsoft Office on the Mac.
Lars over 3 years ago
Lol Paul! So much irony in the fact that your voice is being played back in a Flash audio player!
Flash will be around for a long time yet. For games and game-like user experiences, it's still a great option.
patrickrushton over 3 years ago