What is Flash, When to use it?

Flash is a vector animation software originally designed to create animations for display on web pages. Vector graphics are ideal for the web because they are so lightweight. SEO

Over the releases of new versions of Flash, Macromedia has made Flash more and more controllable via programming, where they have it positioned as a competitor to HTML to build interactive web sites and applications such as an e-commerce store. Macromedia argues that Flash is the way to go instead of HTML because of the following reasons:

Flash movies load faster and save on download time because Flash is vector based where as HTML is not.
Flash intelligently ‘caches’ it’s movies so they don’t have to be reloaded.
Flash gives the users (the person viewing/using the Flash movie) a more responsive ‘rich-client’ like experience.

All of these points are true, but they can be true for HTML pages as well (except for the vectors.).

Flash pages can be made to load faster, but most of the time, the way they are designed in the real world, they do not. That is not a Flash problem; it is more an issue of the Flash developers going nuts with fancy and heavy Flash movies.

HTML caches pages as well, once images are downloaded they are held in your browsers cache; the cached images are then used instead of downloading them from the server again.

With new technology like ASP.net and Java Server Faces, HTML now can react just like a ‘rich-client’ application. Even without these new tools, properly designed HTML for most dynamic sites can provide a good user experience.

So when should you use Flash?

Flash should be used when someone wants to create a presentation that is similar to a television commercial. This type of presentation is something where the user sits back and enjoys the show as the Flash movie delivers the message to the client with animation, sound and possibly video. Please do not get this confused with those ever-present ‘intro’ animations that still plague many Flash sites. Rather it’s about informative movies that the user can decide to view to learn about something like a product or a service.

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Monday, August 28th, 2006 at 2:46 am | Trackback Url