Flash is Great August 3, 2007
Posted by deltawing in AJAX, Adobe, Flash.add a comment
Flash is quite a wonder, and I think it’s unfair to say that Flash sucks 
. It’s the way in which you use Flash that determines whether it destroys the usability on your website. For example, using Flash for navigation destroys a screen reader’s ability to help vision impaired users. That is bad. Or, introduction screens, which are a waste of user bandwidth and time.
However, Flash is great. There are just some things that should only be done in Flash. The first thing that comes to my mind is animations and cartoons. You wouldn’t want to animate a entire cartoon using Javascript and an imaginary Javascript Animation Framework (TM). Imagine going head.rotate(45), leg.slide_forward(30) for a couple of years and finally you have your animated series – totally written in Javascript. And XHTML/CSS compliant 
. If you want to see some Flash animations go to www.newgrounds.com. The amount of talent there is staggering.
You may also want to use Flash for games, or to deploy educational programs e.g. teaching students physics in an visual and interactive way. You can code a physics engine in Flash and deploy that to other Flash game developers. After all, Actionscript 3.0 has even better Object Oriented support, allowing large project to be built and managed more efficiently. Finally, Flash video/vector animation banners maybe inject some uniqueness into the increasingly homogeneous world of Web 2.0 
And who says Flash won’t improve. It is already an incredibly versatile product, more likely than not Adobe will work hard to improve its accessibility features
Cya
AJAX was already around in 1996 July 26, 2007
Posted by deltawing in AJAX.add a comment
AJAX was already around in 1996
Well, ok. Strictly speaking it wasn’t. However when you think about what AJAX really does, the first ideas were already there back in the 90s. In the form of *gasp*, frames!
After all, frames allowed content to be refreshed without the entire page refreshing. But they died out, partly due to their problems with users entering the websiteoutside of the frameset through search engines. Also, they were incredibly bad looking. Sometimes, web designers would turn off scrolling for the menu frame, and people with low resolutions couldn’t see the entire menu. Also, don’t forget the lack of XML.
Then came along iFrames, which provided functionality similar to frames but in a much more flexible manner, without the need for pesky framesets. Actually, I believe lots of people still prefer this method of the complexities of AJAX. Indeed, I use it sometimes. Although it is considered “hackish”, it does work.
Last but not least, we have Adobe Flash. An incredibly powerful piece of technology, it seems to do everything AJAX does, and more. Not only that, it is in my opinion, easier to implement, as Flash offers a drawing interface tofor the graphical aspect of your application. Perhaps even more importantly, with Flash you don’t have to worry about those nail-biting cross-browser incompatibility problems with graphics and layout. Phew.
I’m just wondering why more people aren’t using Flash over AJAX? I’m no expert on this topic, so if you’ve got the answer feel free to comment. I want your opinions.
