A Report On Flash |
Now playing ... |
|
Flash is a technology for providing interactive multimedia on your web site.
It can provide audio, animation, and video; and it it can also process
mouse clicks. Good examples of flash can be found on the
Linx Examples Page.
The capability to handle flash is now built into Internet Explorer (5.0 or above) and Netscape (versions after 1998). Flash player plug-ins can also be downloaded
for other browsers. Because
Macromedia
continues to add new features to Flash, they provide a web site for downloading updated Flash players to play the new features. Flash can be created using special Flash editors, two of which are
Macromedia's Flash Editor and
Wildform's
Linx Flash Editor. Flash can be played by either
Macromedia's Flash Player or Shockwave Player.
Flash Player delivers fast loading front-end Web applications, user interaction, and short to medium form animation. Shockwave Player is for high end graphics applications such as interactive, multimedia sales and marketing presentations, and multimedia (and sometimes multiuser) games. Most new computers come pre-loaded with both players. Currently more than 350 million computers have a Shockwave Player and more that 500 million have Flash Players. As new Flash capabilities are added, updated free players can be downloaded
Macromedia's Flash Player Download Site or their
ShockWave Download Site
History of Flash
The inventor of Flash, Jonathan Gay, started with a graphics editor called SmartSketch. He added animation in 1995 and delivered it via the web - using Java to "play" the animation. He subsequently rebuilt the player as a plug-in when Netscape offered that capability. The product then became known as "FutureSplash Animator." This product was picked up by Microsoft and became a critical piece of their MSN offering. Another major customer was Disney where FutureSplash Animator was noticed by Macromedia. In December 1996, FutureSplash Animator (owned by Gay's company, FutureWave Software) was bought by Macromedia and became Macromedia Flash 1.0.
Flash is now in its 5th version at Macromedia and has retained a good amount of its original code. It's now used by over 500,000 developers and the player is resident on more than 500 million computers. Jonathan Gay is currently Technology Vice President for Flash and Generator at Macromedia.
This material was excerpted from an
article
on the Macromedia Web Site.
Flash Design Considerations
Flash provides a wide-ranging set of capabilities that can be
attractive, informative and highly interactive. However, like many of
the features of HTML,
Flash can be misused.
In an article entitled,
Flash is Evil,
the author laments the
"Gratuitous Animation" of Flash.
In
another article
on the web, some commonly found problems noted were:
- Long loading sites
- Bad navigation
- Useless Flash
- Full screen Flash
Full screen Flash takes over your entire window and prevents you from using normal
browser capability. This leads to the annoying problem of not being able to use the "Back" button to leave. There are ways around this, but they require special
Javascript coding by the Flash author.
- Over animation
- No content
Sometimes in their zeal to put "eye candy" on a site, web authors forget to put any meaningful information on their page, or they obfuscate it with the eye candy. In one
study In his book
"Web Site Usability," researcher Jared Spool notes that many users were
so annoyed with the animation on a web site that they covered it with their hand.
Interestingly enough, the
Macromedia Site
falls prey to many of the above problems.
To create Flash, you need a special editor. This is a good news/bad news story. The good news is that the editors are very powerful, yet very user friendly. They allow you to put together multimedia sites with no programming experience required. The bad news is that you have to pay for the editors.
Macromedia's Flash editor
costs about $500. You can also find a cheaper set of products from
Wildform
for $50-$250 depending on the capabilities you want. Their editor is called
Linx Flash Editor
On the
airGid.com site, a review of good flash is presented.
It is called
Flash 99% Good (airGid has a ways to go yet).
This review provides a list of
assumptions
that allow you to build Flash content that will be usable by a wide-variety of users. It basically tells you to "keep it simple, stupid."
In another article, entitled
Flash "Sales Demo" Planning Guide
Zoubin Zarin a media consultant provides set of guidelines that can be provided to not only Flash pages by Web pages in general. Macromedia also has a good set of
guidelines
that should be considered when using Flash on a page.
Flash Resources