Good Day. Flash is everywhere right now, and I will confess I build almost everything in it. If I needed to find a place to rent, I would build a little Flash applet to do it. It did not matter what the task was, I was writing it in ActionScript, assembling it in Flash, and putting it up on my Hostgator server.
What I love is the object oriented nature of it, and the magic of tweening. You set a start state and an end state, and the software fills in every step between them on its own. To put that motion into a website, and watch it open an audience's eyes exactly where you wanted their attention, is intoxicating. Between Flash and, for a short while, Director, the animation side of this work has never been more alive.
Flash took the limits of tables and CSS and simply removed them, then added a flavour of motion on top. For a designer who came up fighting browser quirks, that freedom feels like the future arriving early.
And yet it worries me, even as I use it. Flash needs the Flash Player to run, and the Player is forever updating. If a visitor does not have the right version, you are back in the browser chase all over again, rewriting the same work several times to keep it alive. That is a nuisance dressed up as progress.
My clients, I think, believe Flash will become their backend world-runner, a fully customizable liquid canvas that auto-forms to whatever they need, animated and database-driven and endlessly clever. I understand the dream. I am not certain the foundation can carry it.
Because here is what Flash is quietly teaching me. Security matters. The way this technology sits inside the browser opens loopholes, and I suspect that, over time, those loopholes will be its undoing rather than its update cycle. I will enjoy every animated minute of it. I will also not be surprised when something more open and more honest takes its place.
Jonathan Ellis · Edmonton · June 2006