Category: Technical

10 years of Flash: from Futuresplash to Flex

Another day, another big anniversary: 10 years of the Flash plugin. When we began working with the internet even images were a controversial addition to the web browser. It was before the dot.com boom, crash, Ajax and the Web 2.0 hype. Before stylesheets, large displays and millions of colours. Clients wanted to express their brand. Designers wanted to show-off. When Flash appeared print designers were revolutionised – they could suddenly be web designers and they didn’t have to use Times New Roman. An experience visually comparable to TV was suddenly possible – and clients and designers ‘got’ TV – and everyone wanted their logos to animate like CNN idents.

The web, though, is not a simple broadcast medium, but to many people trying to understand what to do with it, that’s what it reminded them of. This led to the splash screen, unnecessary loading times, confusing interfaces on mainstream sites, etc. – all now stereotypes of Flash content mistakes.

The tool now, originally just very simple animation called Futuresplash, is now a very different beast. It is a sophisticated visual tool. It can carry video. It can create rich online and offline applications. Flex, Flash’s most recent creation tool from Adobe, is a powerful standards compliant programming tool that is a million miles from Futuresplash’s simple timeline-based animation.

Ironically, the presentation that accompanies Adobe’s history of Flash suffers from many of the stereotypical problems of Flash: tricky navigation, slow loading (see screenshot, above), unnecessary animation that gets in the way of information. I found it so frustrating I had to reload the whole thing, just to be able to navigate on to the next section. The content seems genuinely interesting – but I wish they had a simpler way of accessing it.

This is the opposite of today’s best use of Flash. Examples such as YouTube will never win a graphic design award, but it gets the job done. It blends into the web, is easy-to-use and is enormously popular (although I believe the 60% of all web traffic rumours are probably overdoing it). People, of course, love YouTube, not because it is Flash, but because it delivers them interesting/fun content. In fact, I would guess that the majority of its’ users do not even know it is Flash.

Flash has also found it’s way onto mobile phones and other devices – with apparent great success, although it hasn’t appeared natively on any phones owned by anyone I know. The advantage for Flash on a phone is not only it’s portability and consistency, but it has an opportunity to ‘claim’ the entire user-interface. This gives it a better chance than on the PC as an all encompassing application platform. On the PC it will always jostle with all the other generally consistent widgets of the host operating system user interface (Windows/Linux/OSX).

We recommend Flash regularly, but there are almost no examples wherein we would recommend using only Flash for any website. NHS Alchemy is a case in point. We wanted an exciting opening page, and in the ‘NHS People’ area we utilise it for video and photo stories (with text alternatives).

People who build the web should never get hung up on the technology, people don’t care. People should never be asked to think about whether they have Flash installed. It should never take an age to download. It should blend into their experience and not break any web conventions (like making it impossible to bookmark content). This is equally true for Ajax, Java, Shockwave, Flash or even simple HTML content. The right technology needs to be used for the right situation – and this normally means: keep it simple.

by Andrew Fox

30 August, 2006