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Flash Applications That Can Be Used Online and Off
General Voltron writes "Macromedia, Inc., the same people that brought you Flash, have done it again with a new product called Central. Central will allow users to more easily interact with information on the internet by also allowing them to interact with it offline. It will also allow developers to create and sell their own applications. See the press release." I'm not a big fan of Flash myself, but I realize it has its niche. This looks like something that Flash authors have been clamoring for.
That's some pretty impressive stuff, you have to admit. I couldn't see this getting done very well with DHTML. Animation work, especially interactive anaimation, is the definate niche for Flash. It can be developed so cheaply and so quickly, loaded in any browser with a free plugin, and effortlessly distributed to billions via the internet. Perfect format.
Mod the parent up please. I think the reason a lot of /.ers knock flash is because they associate it with annoying banner ads.
.swf file format sometime, everything is oriented to producing the max amount of consitent content in the smallest bandwidth possible. And Flash 6 has native support for zlib compression, which really helps.
The company I work for makes a fairly successful school-focused educational product (online and off), and we use Flash for our lessons because it's fairly easy to work with (a little limited at times, but getting better), and because you cen fit more content into less bytes with Flash than you can with just about anything else. Seriously, take a look at the
We just released a product that allows the user to fill out sample forms such as resume's, job applications and the like, with the data stored in XML format in a database to be retrived whenever the user wants, and even translated into HTML for printing.
Don't knock it as just a technology for annoying ads, it's actualy a very clever tool, and as the parent noted, it's available for just about every browser in existence.
- sig? who is this sig of which you speak?
Other than annoying website navigation, some web games, and short movie clips, what's Flash used for?
Flash 6 has some very nice server side communication features. I just finished developing a B2B site that provides some extremely nice ability to customize products and show the results online during the ordering process, all database driven. This sort of thing work quite well if you can count on your audience having broadband.
The clients were pissing in their pants when we demo'ed this. It's a level of interactivity thy've never seen on the web before.
In phoenix (possibly Mozilla) with the Tab Browser extensions by right clicking on the title bar of a tab you get a context menu. Under "Permissions" in that menu you can then disable plugins for that particular tab.
Hope this helps.
--- I do not moderate.