Just some thoughts about Flash in this article since it’s one of those things I’ve always thought makes the web more fun to use.
If anything in this world is named appropriately it’s Flash because, for me, the name brings to mind how quick, eye-catching, and unique it can be. Flash Programming lets us have sleek presentations highlighting features of a product or a company’s characteristics in an attractive way, in fact, when Flash isn’t used for banner ads and it looks good, people seem to love it.
Flash programmers are getting so advanced that they’re even able to design and write entire software applications in Flash, that users can interact with and use similar features you’d find in an advanced web application, plus Flash can use much higher quality graphics and still load fast, and contain less common fonts that might not be “web safe” because you don’t have to have the fonts installed on your computer, because simply having Flash is enough.
So if Flash is so good, why isn’t it everywhere? For one, it can’t do everything, and more advanced features are possible than what can be done in Flash. Also, search engines see a Flash presentation as one big object, and won’t let people search through all the useful info/text that might be in the presentation. For example, you’ll notice we have a Web 2.0 style tag cloud on our homepage. Since we also want search engines to know that we think those links are important, we have a text version of that tag cloud, simply displaying the links, which can be read without Flash.
All in all though, Flash has gotten pretty advanced, being used for eye-catching presentations, games, and functional applications.
