A Creative Communications Agency

I hate to admit this, but I’m not on the cutting edge of technology (current clients, please disregard this statement). I guess I should qualify “cutting edge” before I make such a declaration, but it’s a better lead-in. Cutting edge is a relative statement. Compared to my friend who uses a digital camera, but never downloads the pictures and takes the card in to have double prints made; I’m on the edge. Compared to a certain family member who uses a $1,000 computer as a Free Cell gaming console, I’m making the cuts. Compare me, though, against others in this industry and I’m fairly conservative.

Whenever a new version of major software is announced, I take a look. I read a little of the hype and check out reviews, but I never rush to buy. For what it’s worth, I never evaluate beta versions. Usually after 6 months, I will start to make a buying decision. By then enough people have kicked the tires that I have a pretty good idea how much the new software is worth. I usually then buy it or I never get it. Take for instance Microsoft Office. I never upgraded past Office 97.

I was in Vegas at Comdex in the late 90’s. I went to the Microsoft booth and watched as they exclaimed that the new version of Office included tools to generate 3-D Word Art (I almost fell over) and a little Paper-Clip dude to help me out. First of all, Word Art should be against the law. Either you’re a designer and you have the right software – and skills –to create compelling text, or you’re just going to make the document look worse. Don’t even start me on the Paper Clip dude. I finally, did upgrade to that version (it came with a new machine), and the first thing I did was try to figure out how to get rid of the help dude. In my case it was Einstein.

So to me Office is done. I think Photoshop is at the end of the line too — unless, of course, the boys at Adobe want to finally integrate Photoshop and Illustrator. You know, scratch that, integrate Photoshop and Flash and I’ll stand in line at midnight at the local Best Buy. Otherwise, I’m sticking with Photoshop 6.

I’ve finally made it to the subject of this posting — Flash. I think Flash is one of the best pieces of software ever written. Put it up there with Mosaic, Wordperfect, Louts 123, Powerpoint, Outlook, and of course Windows (before you start arguing who actually developed what first, I’m going by mass acceptance).  Flash enabled web pages to display graphics beyond .jpeg’s. It is winning the video internet battle. Finally, it is the best platform for web application development.

Yes, it is the best platform for web application development. I recently started evaluating AJAX. It’s been around for a while, so I figured it was time. The more I read about it, the more I thought, “They’re trying to do what Flash does”. I understand that AJAX is open source (re. you can get it for free). To me, though, it’s worth a few hundred buckets to get better results than AJAX in less time.

Better results than AJAX? Dare I say? Yes, I dare. Flash is the bomb when it comes to animating vector graphics on the web. With broadband and faster PC’s, it is also the best for raster-based graphics. Finally, Flash 8 (yes, I did upgrade and yes, after six months) has the best internet video delivery platform. At least Google, You Tube and I agree on that point.

So AJAX tries to combine Asynchronous Javascript and XML. Well Flash has been doing that for years. Actually I have been doing that for a few years (maybe I am cutting edge). When I build a Flash application. I call a remote XML file, and then display the resulting dataset depending on how the user interacts with the interface. It’s Flash, so the user never has to submit a page and I don’t have to worry about browser display incompatibilities. Add to that the far superior media display capabilities of Flash and I’m having a hard time using AJAX. Finally, with AJAX you usually have to start from scratch and you have to traverse the DOM.

SEO people will say that search engines don’t like Flash (I’ll cover that in another posting). I’m talking about internet applications, though. They are dynamic in nature, so it doesn’t matter if the page is indexed. You can satisfy the search engines by inserting HTML around the Flash object describing what it does. Beyond that you don’t need to index a person’s personal results from a web application.

Hey I’m not trying to give AJAX a complex, but it just doesn’t offer me anything that I can’t get with Flash. Google Maps is a great AJAX application, but Yahoo maps accomplishes the same result with Flash. Add the fact that Flash is easier to use (managers who happen to be reading this, that means it saves money) and handles media better, and the choice is easy for me.

So I think I will continue to stand back from the cutting edge with AJAX. I will continue to build web applications with better media handling capabilities and layout control in a more efficient manner. At least I’ll do that until Microsoft buys Adobe and takes Flash off the market.