There was a time when Flash impressed me with its’ amazing ability to render clean, scalable animation with an insanely low footprint. For me it all started with Future Splash a little independent app that competed with Macromedia’s Shockwave. The days when we measured a web page by kilobytes, carefully calculating if we would go over 40kb. That pesky bandwidth was so limited. Here was a tool that gave us access to beautiful glorious animation with only a plugin to consider. It was a no-brainer. Flash was incredible.
First let me say this. I don’t give a tinkers-cuss about what Steve Jobs says on the subject. I don’t care about his motives, I don’t care how it hurts Shantanu Narayen and Adobe. All I care about is the user experience.
‘Flash-forward’ 15 years later.
First let me say this. I don’t give a tinkers-cuss about what Steve Jobs says on the subject. I don’t care about his motives, I don’t care how it hurts Shantanu Narayen and Adobe. All I care about is the user experience.
Today I loath Flash. It’s slow. I hate the way my machine literally whines when a page loads. I hate that the only time my browser locks up is when it has something to do with Flash. I hate that clients still have this fascination with splash screens and bouncing logos. Give me content. Let me read it the way I want to read it. Flash started as an animation tool and has bloated into a platform that does not lend well to mobile devices.
A last word. If Adobe does trim it down, clean it up, optimize etc. etc. I’ll surely give it another glance. But for now I’ll enjoy its demise.