DesignerMark Blog

What is Flash?

Adobe Flash is a powerful creation tool for interactive and interesting website development possibilities.

Flash is used mainly for online browser games, animated banner adverts, video players, interactive showcases and sometimes entire websites.

It allows extremely flexible, dynamic and smooth animation, intricate mouse interaction and logic, audio/music playing in synch with things happening onscreen, video playback and pretty much anything can be programmed using it’s built in ActionScript programming language. It also has potential to create content dynamically using ‘Generator’, although this can be very complex to setup!

However there are some serious issues to consider before you go ahead and use it.

What are the pros and cons?

Pros:

• Can make very engaging sites or components of sites, with animation and sounds.
• Good for keeping the attention of a younger audience or for music artists websites.
• Can create unique experiences unlike any other websites.
• Great for making simple casual games.

Cons:

• Requires a browser plugin, which has various versions available, so users may not have the correct version even if they have Flash installed.
• If they have not got the plugin installed, you lose a bit of control of what happens. It is possible to send them to alternate content, or trigger a page requesting they download the plugin.
• To make the more interactive and interesting sites (i.e. making the most of Flash), development time (and cost) is considerably more than a static site with some clever DHTML tricks and/or other techniques.
• Will not play at all on ANY Apple mobile devices such as iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad. This is a serious consideration as many users are now accessing websites with these devices so you would potentially be cutting a huge chunk of your prospective audience out.
• Not inherently DDA compliant, especially if you have a lot of mouse controlled elements.
• Not all computers can play Flash smoothly, especially true if there is a lot going on within the animation. If written inefficiently, Flash can be a major processor and resource hog, so would not work well on older PC’s.
• Because it CAN do so much, it’s easy to go over the top in terms of what content and ‘snazzy effects’ one implements. Harder to know when to stop or what to do in the first place due to it’s open-canvas nature.

As you can see from those bullets, the ‘cons’ list is a lot bigger! Of course every case and every website is different so you will have to judge whether the negative points are not relevant to your audience and therefore if using Flash is still appropriate for your needs.

Summary

The main situations I would normally recommend using Flash are when designing websites for kids, or when you want to synch sound or music up with visuals. I have never recommended using it “just for the sake of it” as I feel that the downsides outweigh the benefits in most cases.

The big drawback now and going into the future is the fact that Apple have banished it from their mobile devices due to some very valid reasons. This is a huge market and hugely growing percentage of web surfers. For this reason alone I predict that a lot of the bigger sites that still use Flash (for media delivery in particular) will be converting their sites  in the next year or so to other ways of delivering this content, such as HTML 5 or QuickTime with embedded mp4 movies, to be compatible with iDevices.

At the same token, for new websites I would now always specify that video not be delivered with Flash. HTML 5 will be a level playing field when it rolls out properly in the next generation of browsers but it’s a good time to think about it now and not paint yourself into a corner if you’re developing a new website.