Flash is a Distraction?
I think everyone in the design/computer industry has heard of the recent merger announcement that Adobe and Macromedia are joining forces. If not, check it out first here.
Now I've seen dozens of people posting their thoughts on the matter. Some express concern, but hope and others are flat out against it because they hate monopolies or due to some other short-sighted perception they have.
Today I read a post by a guy named Tim Bray (never heard of him before) where he claims that "Flash is a distraction." According to the genius that is Tim Bray... "most of the good things you can do with Flash, you can do about as well with DHTML." This shocked me and is of course an absurd lie. Unless your definition of "the good things" is limited to rollover buttons, dynamic menus and other boring-ass DHTML functions.
I'm not knocking DHTML (I actually love it), but it's not about movement, presentation or anything sleek and alive. DHTML has its strengths and Flash has its - I don't know why people want to isolate and compare all the time. Now I understand that some people don't like the sexy approach to websites and for all of you - go to Google.com and stop reading now, cause you won't appreciate my POV at all.
I'm a designer foremost and I will state 100% that you can do far more with Flash than you can with DHTML. Try doing some of these things in DHTML and I don't mean kinda doing them, I mean doing them just as well or hell even close to as well:
Explosis
Plot Design
2D Depot (click Launch Site)
The answer is no, but considering this guy's own website and how boring and uninspiring the design is, it makes sense that he'd say something as silly as this. Now let me point out more strange comments from Timmy...
Tim Says: "Macromedia has never made any serious money with Flash."
I Says: "Flash is one of Macromedia's #1 revenue makers. They make money in licensing, advertising and selling development software for the number 1 online animation delivery system in the world. You don't get out much"
Tim Says: "Adobe, historically, has been good at focusing on what works and dropping the distractions"
I Says: "Oh really? Like when they tried to make their own competing Flash product called LiveMotion and they dumped millions into development only to have it fail before version 3? Or are you talking about their incredible 3D software that no one uses? Adobe's all about distraction and they suck ass at delivering web content in a user-friendly way. The PDF format has been around for years and most of the beginning computer users I know have no idea what it is or what it's for. They know Flash though."
I know I come across as confrontational, but when I see someone spouting this kind of nonsense, I have to address it. Besides, free speach on the net, right. Hey, the guy works at Sun, so can you really blame him? I guess if they had it their way, we'd be running all our animations in Java.
