Flash: Saviour of the Universe?
Out of context: Reply #23
- Started
- Last post
- 24 Responses
- mikotondria30
Flash's greatest strength was the ease with which one could intuitively animate, with the added bonus that you could make the animation interactive and so present the user with a previously unseen medium - interactive animation, which they loved.
Then they spent the next several revisions trying to implement all the functionality of a normal web-page, with notable exceptions like the ajax-like send and load, whilst barely adding significant improvements to the core animation/design. In the end, everything is not awkwardly programmed, but abstractly programmed, including animation, which is improved from Flash 4 days only significantly if one codes it.
Like a tree with 2 branches, the functionality of Flash grew too rapidly and eventually the creative flourish driven by designers was toppled by an army of snarky developers endlessly bitching about why a fricking text-box scroller class wasn't properly instantiated, and custom listeners tracing out variables in the bubbling phase. Working in Photoshop and having to cobble together some jQuery was much more appealing all of a sudden, plus as said above, being able to present a client with a CMS was a great plus.
I used to spend all day and a lot of the night in Flash, early on it was being inspired and exploring the medium. Towards the end it was wracking my brains and scouring forums looking for a solution to a problem related to doing the simplest of tasks. And finding out it was a known 'bug' and that I'd have to try another way or another idea entirely.
Plus the means to produce swf files seemed to fracture into a thousand different directions, probably technically for the good, but once the IDE became bloated and overly complex for initiates that was really the end of the golden days. And honestly it actually hurts me a little inside to write that - I loved that program. I loved cobbling together a crazy design in photoshop, importing it, using the timeline, adding some generative AS2, sound, interactivity, when it was all balanced a pitched to people with just my levels of creative inspiration and skill-set it really was a brave new world, and for the next generation of coders and designers, they won't really know what it was like to be on that trip, and that's a bit sad - working in Flash in the first few years of the 21st century totally blurred the lines between coding and design and I don't think we'll see such a fruition of new ideas at that rate again.