HiveMinds

[rodrigo]

why do people hate flash? << here is a topic that we can talk about.

I read this interview on a site called digitalabstracts.com and they were interviewing eric.jordan from 2advanced. And the interviewer asked

"- Jakob Nielsen says that flash is bad in 99 percents.What do u think about that?

"I will reiterate my comments in Cre@teOnline Magazine, “Jakob Nielson and his disciples may be stirring controversy, writing books, and conducting studies, but make no mistake they are actually representative of an elitist faction of web surfers who simply despise the future and change.” The concept of usability is a sound one, it has just been taken to the extreme by people like Jacob. Human beings are sensory organisms. This will never change. Let the world be as it is.
.

**i agree with him, people are too scared to move on and change.
eric.jordan
2advanced.com[/b]

[Richard C.]

To start on a sober note:

People don't hate Flash. But the problem is that Flash works in its own space in the browser. Normal browser controls (the back button, bookmarks, deep links, search, text size, printing, etc) don't work. And remember that these controls are in the users domain, and affect usability negatively.

The other problem with Flash is that people who develop it are often graphically-oriented and not information-oriented (the web is an information-focussed medium, after all). That often leads to sites with lots of 'bells and whistles' where the information content can be poor or at worst non-existent. 'Television envy' was a phenomenon years ago but we ought to be past that.

Flash can be good as 'brochureware' and for presentations where animation adds to the content, but for whole sites (apart from very small ones) it has some serious drawbacks.

It's not a question of one or the other, either, but a question of recognising the strengths and weaknesses of a particular technology, be it Flash, browsers, or meat grinders, and using them appropriately.

And about people being sensory beings: using a browser is first and foremost like sitting in front of a computer. If I want sensory experiences, I get them in the real world, not on the internet.

[dbmasters]

In addition, not as a common surfer but on the design/development/project management side I can say I don't hate Flash, I find it to be a fun "escape" from everyday work at times. What I do hate are Flash developers that for some reason (rodrigo, don't take offense to this, just stating an opinion) find Flash to be the answer to everything. I hate this largely because it is the answer to very few things depending on the role you are trying to play.

Also, I echo Richards statement that people who make the Flash quite often should not be the person story-boarding the Flash because quite often it does not do it's job, it just looks cool.

ridrigo, your version 2 website I just saw is a huge step forward from version 1. Your version 1 flash website was a pretty decent example of bells and whistles being more important than content. Your newest one actually has some content...and it's even organized a little bit. kudos.
_________________
Dan
dB Masters Multimedia - Google AdSense Tips - MonaVie

[SoopahMan]

The #1 problem with Flash, working from Nielsen's comments, is the "You broke my Bookmarks" problem. Most of the simple UI browsers offer is broken by Flash. Few efficient uses of Flash result in anything being Bookmarkable but the homepage.

Bookmarks are worst inflicted, but usability concerns arise too when you think of handicapped people. Yes, they have an HTML version to work with in many cases, but it's often inferior, out of date, or of course, absent. And it's often image-heavy, which of course doesn't help the blind.

[C]

I don't hate flash but I do hate how it's used most of the time. Good uses to me are when I expect a Flash movie like Stickman fights or just recently I became intrested in how Flash can be used to deliver dynamic content like graphs and e-learning. There are so many good ways to use flash but most use the ways that make me alt+F4.

What really turns me off is a commercial of a website done in Flash. It's painful for the same reason that a tv commercial is irritating.
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I was annoyed by the fact that God was testing my atheism by sending aliens to my door to ask for proof of his existence.
hiveminds.co.uk

[Richard C.]

Native SVG support would be a different story: it's exposed to the browser and not encapsulated like Flash.

[ToddK]

I'll re-emphasize what sooph said about handicapped accessibility.

This is becoming a huge issue in the government. The government is one of the major employers of tech sector employeees in Canada and the USA. The government won't touch Flash with a ten foot poll. This is because of the accesability nightmare.

By law(for canadian government sites) you need a site for visually impaired people that can be read with a screen reader. This means that if you create a site in Flash then you have to create an accessible HTML version with the same content. This is doubling the work and the funding needed. Then you have to manage and maintain two seperate versions.

So there is a huge market of developers who can't use Flash.

[Nocturns2]

When I first got Flash, I was all excited! Specially when I realized all the stuff that it was able to do. I played around with it for a while making animations and learning how and what formats to use to animate images and drawings.

Than, I went looking for a way to apply all this new stuff and I wondered how it would work with databases.
I found that it works pretty good with databases as a way of presenting the data. First I found examples of asp using access databases. Than I wanted to push the envelope and used dreamweaver ultradev to add a jsp connection to my flash on my jrun server (which it took me a week to try and figure out how to get DW to return the data to flash without sending it to a detail page), dw creates too much code to handle stuff unless you write it in yourself.

In the end, I found that all that was only allowing me to have a fancy frontend for entering search queries and displaying the results. Which can be achieved with css (sometimes with javascripts).

But where flash took most of its hits was on the time clock. Most flash, regardless of how sleek, take longer to open compared to an html, even if the html has database duties.

Also I was impressed with the fonts issues of flash. I was happy to see that fonts that were only on machine when I created a flash were also visible when it was opened on the internet. Until I saw it opened on a mac at a printhouse that I was showing it to from a web site. It broke down on the mac, talk about wanting to find a rock to crawl under. The very thing about the flash was to show a frontend for selecting fonts specs not otherwise available on the users machine to personalize products with for a b2b.

Additionally, to edit a flash you have to take it back to the fla file and re-publish it aside from tweaking it's host.

Although, I think that flash buttons and things like that are probably a better option than the web-bots.

[SoopahMan]

I'd like to point out that many here's comment that they don't hate Flash, just how it's used exactly echoes Jakob Nielsen's statement about Flash. It doesn't demand you do bad things, but it's generally used to do so :wink:

The best uses for Flash I've seen have been to make a flashy replacement for small parts of a website used over and over, like top-level navigation - so they can easily swap with an HTML version and be maintained - and games.

Flash site introductions are cheesy.

[ToddK]

I hate site intros. Especially for any site I would go to more than once.

[Richard C.]

OTOH, when used intelligently, Flash can be excellemt:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/middle_east/02/iraq_navigator/html/default.stm

[chlucy]

Richard, that's one of the best uses of Flash I've ever seen. I usually don't care for flash and always skip flash intros. I'm sending that link to my father-in-law who's always interested in Middle Eastern affairs. (Still has his maps of the area in the basement with little tags on them depicting the Persian Gulf War).

[rodrigo]

how many of you are flash users? , i know some people don't even wanna touch flash, but they look at the program and say "nope, i won't even bother learning", i think in the design aspect of it, who ever the designer is needs to have some creativity, anyone can make a site but there are some people who "have it" and some who don't, do you people agree? Also... i wanna know what is your goals as a designer or a developer?

/rodrigo

[dbmasters]

Yes I use Flash, but not for any basic functionality of a site. My goal, depending on the client, is to reach as many people as possible and get the most information to them possible in a usable, consistant and pleasant manner. This means sniffing a browser, seeing what it can do and using whatever you can for each specific user in some cases.

I have personally never looked at a program and said "I won't even bother learning". That is not the mentality that makes a successful designer or developer.

Of course some peeps have it and some don't. It is an art just like any other art. Just cuz you can play the notes doesn't mean you are making music...it can be learned, but there is no replacement for a God-given gift and great gut instincts. (for those of you that believe in that sort of thing )
_________________
Dan
dB Masters Multimedia - Google AdSense Tips - MonaVie

[Richard C.]

You might get a better response if you addressed some of the opinions voiced in this thread, rodrigo.

Personally, I never use Flash as I'm more a programmer/info systems guy, less a designer. I considered learning it once (and had a look at it) but to get anywhere you have to specialise and it's just not my end of the business. Flash would not help me achieve my goals at all, due to its lack of data-awareness, and the encapsulated model I mentioned above.

But what ticks me off most of all about Flash is the way many designers insist on forcing a timeline onto every mouse click...once you've seen the 'cool transition' once, it starts getting in the way.

Whether people have creativity (and in what form) has nothing to do with the technology they choose. A good designer would produce a good result with the technology that fits the purpose in hand, be it Flash, vanilla HTML or DB-driven sites.