Posts Tagged → Multimedia
Flash: ifs and buts
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.
Interactive digital magazines: the future of print?
Adobe has announced that it will be selling it’s newly developed platform for creating interactive digital media, Adobe Digital Viewer.
The system works with similar tools to InDesign CS5, by which I assume they mean one can export the core content and layout from InDesign to add interactivity in the Digital Viewer software.
A fantastic example of what can be achieved when it comes to interactivity is the launch edition of ‘Wired’ magazine for the iPad. The Adobe software was actually developed FOR and in conjunction with Wired’s publishers for this very edition.
Wired Digital is a very rich experience, with touch gestures to navigate the ‘pages’ – including articles with dynamic areas of changing content, embedded movie clips, audio and interactive advertising.
For example there is music playing in the background of an article about a music artist so you can listen to his latest tune whilst reading the article.
Product review articles can behave more like a mini website so that instead of scrolling through many pages of text, you simply click the picture of the next product you want to read about and the text changes on the same page without needing to scroll or move your field of view.
Adverts can get more information across in the same amount of space without overwhelming the area with too much text at once by having interactive ‘layers’ of content, revealed by a tap.
Another example of a great advert in ‘Wired’ is one in which you can ‘build’ a Lego car by swiping your finger sideways slowly. The stop frame animation cycles through the stages of the Lego being constructed!
Products can have 360º spinable photos, so users can ‘look around’ the product… not exactly a replacement for seeing something in the flesh, but a lot more engaging than a fixed view photograph.
From Adobe’s Press Release:-
“Readers are able to experience the design fidelity of a print magazine, with the dynamic interactivity of digital media.”
See the full Adobe Press Release here: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/201006/060110AdobeDigitalViewer.html
Personally I really do see this taking off, with one huge caveat… development cost.
The Wired magazine took 1 year for the designers to create. Admittedly this was largely due to the fact that it was all new and software was being co-developed to support and enable this way of doing things but even so, with this rich level of content its not going to be quick to get the maximum quality possible.
I think for smaller publications if the sights are set to a reasonable level there is no reason why this couldn’t work well though, but to do a whole 100 page magazine would be an immense amount of time and work, so it would be hard to make all of the content current at time of publication.
The other downside are the filesizes of the finished articles. The Wired edition weighs in at around 500mb which took a while to download and certainly cannot be obtained through 3G. It’s not a massive problem because they will tend to be downloaded through a home internet connection (either directly on the device or via a desktop/laptop computer) and synched to the iPad, but it might put some people with limited storage space off, and becomes something you won’t ‘keep’ forever.
So, is this the future of media? It has pros and cons (doesn’t everything) but I think and hope that we are going to see more and more of this exciting content emerging. Save the trees!!
