To Flash Or Not To Flash…

  • By Steven Riis-Christensen
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  • Blog
flash

For years now I have been a proud flash website designer and animator.

In 2000, when I was fresh out of multimedia design school, Flash 5 was the hottest thing to hit the web. Finally, no more static web pages, the only limit was my own imagination as to how "flashy" and animated I wanted my designs to be. I was never what you would call a Flash programmer, but I knew enough Actionscript2 to design great interactive websites as well as Flash banners, intros and eVites.

Then along came Actionscript3...

As hard as I tried to find the time and teach myself the basics and reach the same level of programming kowledge that I had with AS2, it was impossible. I kept switching back to AS2 and eventually gave up on AS3 due to it's complexity. Here's a good example... In AS2,the code for an action on a button would look something like this:

on (release) {
gotoAndPlay(2);
}

The same action in AS3:

button.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, clickFunction);
function clickFunction(evt:MouseEvent):void {
gotoAndPlay(frame);
}

I'm guessing that a programmer would be able to explain all of the benefits of the new code to me, but personally as a designer it was just a royal pain in the butt. After reading many articles on the subject, I concluded that Adobe had taken Flash the way of the programmer and thankfully left the AS2 option for the designers. It's just sad that I don't have the time to learn a whole new scripting language after so many years using the product.

iPhone, iPad, etc...
When Apple announced that the iPhone would not support Flash based on a variety of issues including reliability, security and performance, I knew that a change was coming for all of my future web projects. With over 50 million iPhones sold, and 85 million iPhone and iPod touches sold, I would have to embrace HTML and CSS once again, and honestly, I was still a little pissed off at Actionscript3, so it was all good :)

Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) thoughts on Flash article

I will continue to use Flash for all of my websites that don't require iPhone or iPad accessibility, intros and web banners, but will most likely dedicate all of my new learning time to HTML 5 and CSS... If ever Apple and Adobe come to some agreement, who knows, I just might consider getting back into Flash and tackling Actionscript3, but for now, R.I.P. Flash, I got bills to pay!!!