Flash: Good Bad or ugly?

[Dr. Web]

I would like some comments on flash designed splash pages, full flash websites, and HTML pages with embedded flash animation...maybe for navigaton or whatever.
Do you like flash?
Do you think it has a future on the web?
Best/ worse Flash pages/ animations?

Here is a article to spark your curiosity.

http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/final_solution.html

[Doni FN]

I like Flash as long as its good and serves a purpose, What I dont like is just a pointles animated welcome to enter a site.

[t3mul3nt]

"mmmmm..... shockwave" - h. simpson

the honeymoon's over as far as i'm concerned. flash has some really pleasing aspects to it, no more java scripts for mouseover effects, the death of animated gifs, etc. but like anything else in life, some web designers are working on austrailian time and are just now getting hip to motion tweening on their text and graphics, and are also not checking file sizes too closely when designing from their own drive.

and a mindset like "oh, people will wait for the 400k download" is still suicidal. for every one person with a dsl/isdn/t.x connection there's two more with a dialup at molasses.net. case in point, my former employer: http://www.slangmusicgroup.com. while i love the design of the site, it's slow, it's got too much flash-induced eye-candy to be functional, and the web designer left out meta tags in the html doc so there goes actually searching for any of the people on the site.

just because you can embed all those pretty pictures and pretty sounds doesn't mean that you necessarily should. websites are still supposed to provide information at the most simple level, when the wait time goes up just so you can wow people with your flashing logo... christ, we're right back to where we were four years ago with javascript, gif animation, etc.

on the good side: very handy. very easy to use. and coming very close to universal.

judson/t3mul3nt

[Dr. Web]

I will agree on the universal thing. The latest research put people able to view flash animations over 90%. And people do like eye candy. Still.....400k pages, animation for the sake of animation, and poor useability are killing flash. Like anything else...its possible to make a horrible HTML page....and its equally possible to ruin a flash page.

[jonirvine]

Flash definitely has it's uses and can be an added feature to some sites. It's good for small embedded animations that add to an overall feel of a page (razorfish.com?) and things such as tutorials and tours.

I'm not a fan of flash sites though, they slow my computer down too much....lol I'm also VERY impatient!

I'd agree that it is the future also. With broadband expansion, flash and it's equivalents will no doubt become much more widely used for full sites and interactivity.

90% of people have flash plug-in? Last time I researched it, it was like 60%.....time surely does move fast on the ol' Internet.

Jon

[Dr. Web]

yes, over 90%. The flash plug in in pre-installed with IE and Netscape browsers 4.0 and higher. over 90% are using 4.0 or higher browsers, and a lot of the rest have just downloaded the plug in.

[jonirvine]

Cool, what % of people are using Netscape 4.6+ and IE+

Only I made a site for someone a while back and she was upset because it didn't work in Netscape 4.04... can't be that many people with this surely?

jon