A Place Between Here

This series of tutorials will focus on the various multimedia content and the considerations you have to do before deploying them online.

Why ? well, I do website setups for people and make biddings for website setups, and often people are considering Flash as the only way to present multimedia content, which is a shame, because there are so many things you can do without Flash.

And why avoid Flash ? Flash is great for many things, but…the big but, Flash is a proprietary format by Adobe, it’s not open and basically the only way to make flash files is by using Adobe Flash, any updates are, traditionally speaking, a new flash file. I am aware that flash supports database connections, but honestly, how many use them and if you do work for a big client they might not give you access to their databases and then you have to use separate XML files or similar, that still demands a bunch of maintenance. This is from the website designers point of view, now for the page viewers point of view:

Flash is a plugin from Adobe in your browser, it’s multi platform, but how multi-platform ?

Windows: Fine, though it demands some CPU.

Mac: Flash is rather CPU intensive, especially considering many Mac computers are small (Macbook(Pro) Mac Mini and the older G4 & G5s) these small laptops are normally known for being quiet and running cool, but try streaming some flash movie and your Mac gets hot and noisy, not a good user experience.

Linux: back when I ran Linux last time I had two major problems, 3D graphics support and Flash, it could’ve gotten better, but honestly I don’t think so, Adobe is focusing a lot on it’s Windows market, like many other software developers.

Mobile devices, Flash isn’t fully supported on all devices, many support various formats and specifications of Flash (Flash lite) and on the very popular iPhone there is no flash support, and don’t expect it to come either the coming months.

To often I see pages that rely 100% on flash, especially in the market I’m in, they look nice, have a nice intro movie and feels interactive, but they don’t render on my iPhone and my browser crashes sometimes viewing these pages, because someone thought it would be a good idea to use a lot of Flash and by the newest standards, not supported in my Browser.

You do need Flash ? if so, be sure to have a browser/platform check, and make an alternative site or at least an apology that your page can’t be viewed on the users device.

Why do people want to or demand using Flash ?

Movies/Animations, FLV (Flash Video) is a nice light format for internet viewing, and it supports bandwidth check up, so it adjust the amount of data being transmitted if the user have a bad connection.

Interactive websites, for artistic reasons or games.

Rich fonts, sIfr this is a great new way of using alternative fonts, instead of “web safe fonts” (the fonts everyone got on their computers) but since it’s Flash based, even the developer, recommends only using it for some texts, not entire websites, also it’s an override of the pages CSS, but at least then you display Helvetica, Handwriting, psycho fonts as if it was normal fonts (copy paste ability) and not using images.

Bad usage of Flash, where alternatives should’ve been used:

Banners (annoying commercial banners are ok, because personally I disable all Flash on websites and I don’t want to see those commercials)

Selection maps

Websites that rely on finding customers online

And in the past few years commercial businesses’ have figures out it’s a good idea to make their commercials getting more attention if they have a roll-over action that will either start a movie or a soundclip, this is such an annoyance that people have developed ways to block all Flash content on sites.

This is partly why I am writing this blog series, you don’t want to annoy your customers and this tendency drives people away from Flash, and this is why we need to use alternatives.

Don’t get me wrong, I use Flash as well… I just feel it’s being misused and I see too many demanding Flash.

Other people with similar view on Flash:

Studio1C

Computer World

The Internet Broadcaster

As you can see this is something fairly recent, I feel it’s a movement for web designers to start looking elsewhere for multimedia support, so lets look into alternatives in the coming weeks.

End of part 1

Part 2 will feature the Quicktime alternatives.

PS: my browser crashed 2 times while surfing and trying to find flash material for this part.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 17:14 and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.