Noob Flash

Not sure who wrote this, but I DO NOT take credit for its greatness… enjoy!

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Dear Mr. Architect:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them).

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)

Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.

To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.

Please don’t bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet.

However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has. I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor’s house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.

Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.

You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can’t happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.

PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I’ve given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can’t handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.

PPS: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case..

An article on the blog “Behind the Curtains” lists 5 reasons to NOT use flash on your website. The real question is can you trust a Contemporary Furniture, Kitchen, and Bathroom blog to give you Flash best practices? Let me address their issues from a slightly more technical position.

First of all, the article states that less is more when it comes to design. This is true in most cases, although you will always have exceptions to this rule. Flash is best used sparingly, but there are some very effectively created “ENTIRE” Flash websites out there. There are disadvantages to using flash to create your entire website, but many of these disadvantages can be overcome with a little effort and research.

1. (Readers can’t hit the back button.) This has been a complaint since Flash was known as FutureSplash Animator. There are several good tutorials out there explaining how to enable the back button in your flash movies.

2. (Link colors don’t work.) This is true, to a point. As a Flash developer, you have to keep web standards in mind as you develop. If you feel that it is important enough to put in the extra effort, you can create your flash movie to mimic the link colors, rollover colors, and visited link colors the way that typical HTML does.

3. (It’s not truly interactive.) This one confused me a bit… The article seems to imply that Flash is not truly interactive because you can’t go where you want to go or download pictures of things you like. They claim that flash limits your interaction. The only thing that flash really limits is your ability to “steal” images, although a simple ctrl + print screen and Photoshop will do the trick. With flash you can still navigate anywhere that the author has created a link to… which is no more limiting than HTML.

4. (It’s not modifiable.) True. To my knowledge there isn’t a convenient way for a user to change the font size of your flash movie unless that functionality has been added by the author of the Flash movie. The times when people use these types of features (Find or Translate) are usually when there is a large amount of text on the page. A page with a large amount of text on it usually works best as an HTML page or at the very least HTML/Flash hybrid.

5. (It is overused.) I completely and totally disagree with this statement. Flash is NOT overused… Flash IS, however, overly misused. Flash intros are almost always an attempt to show off, and usually they are terribly obnoxious. That’s why I recommend avoiding Flash intros at all costs.

Bonus Reason #1. (Google can’t index the page.) True. This is one of the most difficult hurdles to overcome. This problem can be lessened significantly by using Flash on your website instead of creating your entire website out of Flash. If you must have your entire website created in Flash, you can create an accessible version of your site (for the disabled, mobile browser, and search engine spiders) that you will need to maintain separately from your flash movie. This can be a lot of work depending on the size of your site, but will limit the SEO problems you will have.

Bonus Reason #2. (It’s expensive and consumes more important resources.) Flash can be expensive if you hire big name designers and/or have a short timeline. If your audience is right for Flash, however, not using Flash could mean a lower rate of success from your web audience.

I understand that the “Behind the Curtains” article was written from the perspective of a typical web user, but as designers we can overcome many of these problems by implementing best practices in our work and paying close attention to what our web users expect. So, can you trust a Contemporary Furniture, Kitchen, and Bathroom blog to give you Flash best practices? In this case, for the most part, is yes.

Over the last few years, there has been a lot of debate about the Flash Player. I have always told people that the Flash was the best plug-in that you could use. While this is a bold statement, I believe Adobe’s upcoming release of Flash CS3 will help Flash solidify its future as the Rich Internet Application (RIA) development environment of choice. See for yourself – what Flash has to offer may surprise you!

Cross-platform Compatibility
Flash Player is available for every major operating system:

• Windows
• Mac OS
• Linux
• Solaris

Adobe has also released a scaled down version of the Flash Player called Flash Lite, which lets you view Flash content on your mobile phone and PDA. There are more than 14 mobile phone manufacturers that are already pre-loading Flash Lite into their devices and almost 200 cell phone models are Flash-enabled.

Still not convinced? Well, let’s talk about cross-browser compatibility. That’s right; I said the 26 letter word. One of the most amazing advantages to using Flash is that it has very very few cross-browser compatibility problems and the few that it does have are usually related to browser caching or the code used to place the flash object on a site*. Macromedia says 98 percent of browsers include the Flash Player. That’s a huge number of browsers! At this point, Flash has successfully found a way to make the browser standards war completely a non-issue when it comes to their product. Flash gives us a way around the whole mess.

Updating the Flash Player
Flash Player 8 includes automatic update functionality that will periodically check to make sure that you have the latest version of the Flash Player. Previously, updating the Flash Player was a matter of trying to view some flash content that was published for a newer Flash version, or going to the Macromedia (now Adobe) website and downloading the update manually.

When you try to view Flash content that is published for a newer Flash version, there is typically a line or two of code that will attempt to download and install the latest version of Flash behind the scenes so you can view the content on that site. This is still the case today, although the automatic Flash Player updater will probably update most versions of Flash 8 before many people run into a movie they can’t see.

The Power of Flash
In addition to being wide-spread and easy to update, the Flash Player has much more power that any other web-based plug-ins. Most other plug-ins are limited to playback without the ability to accept user interaction.

Flash, on the other hand, has much more to offer. With Flash you can: Create Dynamic and Interactive Websites, Build Single and Multiplayer Online Games, Create Dazzling Ad Banners, Develop Online Video Conferencing (Using the Flash Communication Server), Create Multimedia presentations, Build Chat and Messaging Applications, Load and manipulate images, such as JPEGs, GIFs and PNGs, Load and parse XML (The Release Flash Player 9 and ActionScript 3 are going to make this REALLY easy using E4X… Read More), Communicate with any major server-side technology like PHP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java, etc., Load MP3s at runtime, and also import audio files like WAV and AIFF, and Load and play video (Sites such as YouTube use Flash for video playback). These are just a FEW of the things you can do with Flash.

As you can see, Flash is the most powerful web-based plug-in you can use. With over 98% of users already using the Flash Player and a new automatic update feature in Flash 8, the Flash Player will continue to dominate the RIA market and enhance the user experience for years to come.

*The most common compatibility problems exist while including Flash in the HTML, or in the case of some browsers, support of parameters like transparency.