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Flash For The Rest Of Us
antiher0 writes "The first beta of Perl::Flash is done! You can now use Perl to generate flash animations, etc. I've been waiting for something like this to come along :) BTW, be sure to check out the demo page. You can also check out the project breakdown here."
The article wouldn't be complete without mention of openswf.org. This is where Perl::Flash gets it's backend from. There are also a number of useful Flash tools here as well.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
SMIL would probably be a more appropriate replacement for Flash. It's also XML-based, and SMIL 1.0 has been a W3C recommendation for over two years.
Squeak Smalltalk also has the ability to work with Flash. You can even play flash animations within the Smalltalk environment. See link below.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
"Rather than express your content in the Web's native, open, standardized formats, you've hidden you content inside of a non-native, non-indexable, non-searchable format that a good many surfers can't view."
.jpg is indexable? Well you can index the alt tag...so then a web designer would make sure the text from his/her flash movie would be included in a html tag in the page that brings it up. In fact I've used Flash 4 a bit and when you hit publish the .htm file it outputs does exactly that.
And your average
"Forcing them to download the most-recent Flash plugin just for the privelige of viewing your site is presumptious and unrealistic -- many people will just surf to another site, perhaps one of your competitors."
When designing a site you have to assume that the average hit is gonna come from a newer, faster machine. You can't expect the site designer to continue and continue to make site backwards compatible. I know i wouldn't be trying to get a site to look as good in Netscape 1.0 as it does in IE 5. When I design a page I assume that my average visitor is running win98 which happens to include a flash plugin in the install. I figure I'll also get a decent amount of requests from a Win 95 machine and Linux machines. Most of these though would have probably already downloaded the plugin to view other sites in the past but just in case I'll provide a convienient link to tell them where to get it. It is not designers problem if a user can't keep up with technology, he has to go with the majority. As long as the technology is excepted as the norm (which flash seems to be) go ahead and use it.
"Most companies would kill for a few percentage points of market share. But, by using Flash for a client's web site, you'll exclude people with older browsers and unsupported platforms from using your site. These people represent a sizable market share. Do you think your clients don't want these people as customers? Content hidden inside of Flash can't be indexed by search engines. Do you think that you clients don't want people to find their products and services easily?"
See the above solution for the search engine problem. Plus you can't make every user happy it don't happen. And if your service is technology related such as and ISP or Software company, you see customer with out of date equipment as a big Support Hassle.
"I can't think of one instance of where Flash has made a site better. Just about every use I've seen has been gratuitous. People don't surf the web because they want a Rich Immersive Experience."
Image is everything. It's not how great your product is it's how well you can market, display, and how cute it is. Everybody judges a book by it's cover whether they admit it or not. You also forget sites out there that get tremendous amounts of hits for there flash cartoons or games or what not. Heck with out flash we could have that great Napster Bad movie that made me laugh my ass off. There are other good uses to, I generally dislike the intro's but the other stuff it can do is pretty cool.
Just my thoughts,
-Al-
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
The idea is that Flash is a really interesting technology -- vector graphics, lighweight complex animations, yadda yadda yadda -- but you need proprietary tools to work with it, and the integration with the web browsers is spotty at best -- e.g. they aren't searchable, they don't really support all the standard features like the back button, etc.
That's where Perl::Flash comes in. First & foremost, it's an authoring tool for generating (either one-at-a-time or dynamically-on-the-fly) Flash animations, but I would suspect that it can also be used -- perhaps in Mozilla? -- for other types of manipulation of the Flash file. Cool stuff.
I've just learned that this hasn't been officially released yet -- Simon's on vacation -- so those of you that can get to the twoshortplanks site are seeing experimental code that wasn't yet meant for public review like this. Keep that in mind as you review this stuff -- beta isn't even nearly the word for the code here, so don't be hard on Simon and don't be cruel in pointing out flaws in the code or the ideas: everything is a work in progress at this point.
Whoever this 'antiher0' person is, s|he has revealed this project perhaps a bit too soon....
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
--
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Sorry bub, you've got a few problems in your assumptions and reasoning there.
You say in your first point that flash is not "native, open, [or] standardized". Let's address these one-by-one. First, what do you mean "native"? Native to what? The web browser? Your operating system? Native to a web browser is silly, since they support plugins for the most part (lynx people could define external viewers). Native to your operating system is even sillier, unless you want a kernel module for browsing the web. Most of us run separate programs for doing such mundane tasks, and there are a good number of flash players available for Linux (and other operating systems, of course). Including GPL'd ones.
Which brings us to the "open" part. Since Macromedia released the Flash specification as an open format, I don't know know what the problem is here. A number of libraries and players (GPL'd either way) have been made. The specification is freely available (I'll leave it up to the lawyers, one of which I am not, to determine all the ins and outs of the SDK licensing agreement, but I don't see anything that requires you keep hush-hush about the file format) for download from Macromedia. (The spec might be available separately as well, but I'll leave the digging up to you.)
Since we have an open, portable, ported format that seems to have players on major platforms, including GPL'd players, and a Free(tm) tools for developing the format, and since players seem to come default with most installations (MacOS, Win*, Linux), we seem to have something of a standard. Those of you who use text browsers know enough to set an external player to take care of it for you, or ignore a site altogether for the less-motivated users. :-)
So I fail to see any reality behind your first point.
You state that using Flash means you don't care about your customers. Now for me, someone who wanted to provide a nice, well-designed visual and aural site for the common user, and cared, would use something open and standardized, so that everyone could view it. Point one established that Flash qualifies for this. Really caring would find a way to minimize the bandwidth usage, since most people still probably don't have a lot of bandwidth. Since Flash provides nice vector art and a compact format, it qualifies for this as well. So it seems that wanted to design a nice multimedia site and really cared would take the time to do it with Flash, because we all know how buggy JavaScript support is.
So I fail to see any reality behind your second point, either.
Thirdly, you state that using Flash cheats clients, who can't search or use unsupported platforms to visit your site. Since the majority of people are using Win*, MacOS, Linux, or one of the other supported platforms, for the official viewer or for the GPL'd ones, platform support doesn't seem to be an issue. As many people have pointed out, there is no problem with searching, through various methods, so take your pick. There isn't any problem doing forms in Flash, and since you have a Perl module to generate it, there's no reason you can't do it directly either. You think databases are indexable? How much of your site is static and how much is dynamic content? Create an index and submit it to search engines if this is a concern.
There isn't a problem designing a non-flash site to go along with the flash site as well, for those who for some reason can't upgrade their browser. I'd love to know any reasons why people are stuck below something that can't handle Flash. Resource usage of the viewer is fairly minimal.
So, well, basically, I can't find any reality behind your third point, either.
Finally, you state that using Flash cheats yourself. You can't think of any times that Flash is non-gratuitous. What's wrong with wanting to make a cool-looking site that uses minimal resources and runs on the majority of machines for the vast majority of users?
XHTML and CSS? The number of platforms and browsers that correctly support these (or even completely support plain HTML) is far fewer than those that support Flash. You'll continue to be plagued by the problems that have always plagued HTML and multiple incompatible browsers. You can't have any client-side dynamicity. JavaScript? Unless you're a complete newbie, which I know you aren't, you know very well that the resources it takes to do in JS what Flash can do, as well as maintain multiple versions of the code for multiple browsers, just isn't worth the time. So, I fail to see how HTML, XHTML, and CSS work better than Flash.
Now perhaps you'll come back and say that we don't need all that fancy multimedia crap, that back in the day you toggled in bootloaders in octal on the front panel and considered "?" to be a meaningful error message, so what's the point. So why even bother with HTML, XHTML, and CSS? Plain text. FTP those JPEGS or PNG's. Gopher.
The point is not always to convey raw information. Sometimes, mood and experience are just as important. Sometimes, just having fun is more important. Sometimes those gratuitous graphics and sound aren't really gratuitous at all.
So, I don't really see any reality behind your fourth point either.
Fact is, Flash works for what it does quite well, better than the alternatives (which are basically JavaScript and Java). It's open, and making it open was the best thing Macromedia could have done for it. If they'd opened it sooner, perhaps thrown in a portable, free authoring tool, it might be even more pervasive and widely-used.
It could be overused, misused, and abused, but so can everything else. I see much less abusive Flash than I do JavaScript and animated GIFs. The point is that it can be well-used, and for some things, it really is the most attractive solution.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
First of all a large majority of the people here talking about Flash really don't have any clue what they are talking about. I am currently working on a number of Flash 5 related books, and let me tell you, there is a HELL of a lot more to Flash than most people know... full OOP language, XML, socket connections... the list goes on.
This perl lib is nice and all, but its based on the same library that the basic PHP library is, and really isn't that big of a deal... it outputs Flash 3 files!
If you want cutting edge open source tech for Flash go check out Ming
Ming is a library for PHP, Python and Ruby that really kicks some serious ass!
As for Macromedia Generator, its still by far the leader in this area as it does more than output Flash... it also spits out JPG, GIF, QT, PNG, and Mac/PC exe's. It's more than a dynamic Flash solution, it is a dynamic graphics solution. Think PHP for images. It also has a very powerful plugin architecture based on Java.
Also, I run a mailing list for people who program inside of Flash 5: FlashCoders
A|Q|U|A
- Read Macromedia's own Top 10 Usability Tips for Flash Web Sites to quickly learn how to make your Flash site at least ten times better than the average Flash website.
- Read WebWord's Flash Usability Challenge , co-sponsored by myself, in which a ransom is offered to find a Flash site that is suitable enough for e-commerce to actually make money.
- Read Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox column Flash: 99% Bad for an expert opinion on how Flash makes websites unusable for the average user.
Finally, whatever you do, remember there's a reason why words and characters are so rarely "animated" in the real world. And please don't forget the "Skip Intro" button.--
Now thousands of PERL users can program Flash to generate completely useless splash pages.
Dammit. Sharkey
www.badassmofo.com
http://www.php.net/manual/ref.swf.php.
also check out swift-generator - also perl based. Quite possibly the coolest .swf based tool of all.
- daniel
- daniel
Turn off your computer and go outside
Flash is a binary coded, obfuscated, proprietary format owned and controlled by Macromedia. It's difficult to program for, supported only on select platforms, only with non-free plugins and utilities etc.
Use SVG, an open standard which aims for wide support, based on XML with a very strong underlying rendering model. It rocks.
\end{rant}quick, delete the post.
Taco's gonna see this, well actually just the word PERL and we are all done.
No more "Standards are important for the web" Articles, just rotating logos all over slashdot. And an fscking intro, NOOOOOOO
Oh the humanity.
Well, it's probably to late allready.
"Mommy, mommy! The garbage man is here!" "Well, tell him we don't want any!" -- Groucho Marx