Developers want a brighter Flash
Macromedia Flash would benefit from a more friendly integrated development environment
In October 2000 web usability expert Jakob Nielsen argued that “Flash is 99 percent bad”. He gave three reasons: Flash encourages gratuitous animation, reduces user control, and employs non-standard user controls.
Nielsen reversed his opinion a couple of years later, declaring that the 2002 Flash MX was greatly improved. In reality, Flash did not change fundamentally.
Macromedia will soon release Flash 8, still with the weaknesses Nielsen identified. Even so, Nielsen was 99 percent wrong. The fact that you can design horrific web sites with Flash does not make it bad technology. Plain old HTML is insufficient for today’s web.
Flash’s advantage is that it gives designers a standard client for a rich user interface, independent from the browser or operating system. Flash 8 will offer a better video codec including alpha transparency, improved text rendering, and a richer API accessible via ActionScript, Macromedia’s JavaScript implementation.
The firm’s Jim Guerard says Flash is present on “98 percent of connected desktops”. Macromedia is now trying to establish Flash on mobile devices, though it is not yet common on handsets.
But can Flash escape its niche as a multimedia plug-in and become the application platform Macromedia would like it to be? Technically it has the capabilities. ActionScript is not the best development language, but is useable, and Flash supports XML web services as well as AMF, the proprietary Flash Remoting protocol.
Unfortunately, even in version 8, the Flash design environment is intricate and hard to use. The problem is Macromedia has another development tool for Flash, called Flex. Flex is a server technology for J2EE application servers and generates clients that run in the Flash player. Flex has its own developer-oriented design tool, Flex Builder. Macromedia is pointing developers towards Flex, leaving the Flash IDE as a multimedia design tool.
However, Flash will never fulfil its potential as an application platform while it is tied to an expensive server product. Not every company wants to buy into Flex, which currently only runs on J2EE application servers.
Macromedia has lost sight of its earlier vision: to make the standard Flash IDE the Visual Basic of rich internet apps. Its Studio 8 suite has gone in the opposite direction. “The last two releases have focused on developers to the point where we feel like we’ve left our designers behind,” Guerard said. “So in this release the weighting has been more on the designer side.”
It seems that Macromedia would rather sell a few Flex licences, than have Flash really take off as a rich client.