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What is Flash, When to use it?
Flash is a vector animation
software originally designed to create animations for display
on web pages. Vector graphics are ideal for the web because
they are so lightweight.
Over the releases of new versions of Flash, Macromedia
has made Flash more and more controllable via programming, where
they have it positioned as a competitor to HTML to build interactive
web sites and applications such as an e-commerce store. Macromedia
argues that Flash is the way to go instead of HTML because of
the following reasons:
Flash movies load
faster and save on download time because Flash is vector based
where as HTML is not.
Flash intelligently
‘caches’ it’s movies so they don’t have to be reloaded.
Flash gives the
users (the person viewing/using the Flash movie) a more responsive
‘rich-client’ like experience.
All of these points are true, but they can be
true for HTML pages as well (except for the vectors.).
Flash pages can be made to load faster, but most
of the time, the way they are designed in the real world,
they do not. That is not a Flash problem; it is more an issue
of the Flash developers going nuts with fancy and heavy Flash
movies.
HTML caches pages as well, once images are downloaded
they are held in your browsers cache; the cached images are
then used instead of downloading them from the server again.
With new technology like ASP.net and Java Server
Faces, HTML now can react just like a ‘rich-client’ application.
Even without these new tools, properly designed HTML for most
dynamic sites can provide a good user experience.
So when should you use
Flash?
Flash should be used when someone
wants to create a presentation that is similar to a television
commercial. This type of presentation is something where the
user sits back and enjoys the show as the Flash movie delivers
the message to the client with animation, sound and possibly
video. Please do not get this confused with those ever-present
‘intro’ animations that still plague many Flash sites. Rather
it’s about informative movies that the user can decide to
view to learn about something like a product or a service.
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