Adobe/Macromedia Flash. No other technology in the history of the internet has seen more abuse, other than perhaps Javascript when every so-called web designer went script crazy with it. Thank god the 90s are over. However, bad design still persists.

In an average week of surfing, you may find that half of the sites you visit employ Flash technology in some way. I categorize these sites into 4 categories:

1. Product Showcase (Super Mario Bros., Ford Edge)

2. Design Portfolio (pixelRanger, okaydave, tom brown)

3. Media Delivery (YouTube, last.fm)

4. Because-its-there (Metallica, Deftones, ads4africa)

The first two are designed to create a great first impression, something that will ‘wow!’ you and promote a product or service. The examples listed do just that. For instance, after viewing the Super Mario website, I was compelled to purchase a DS Lite and a copy of the game when it came out in 2006. A designer can add gusto to a bland site with a flash based portfolio to show off their creative skills, such as okaydave.

Perhaps its ultimate, universally agreed upon use is media delivery such as audio and video. YouTube is the most popular video website and can quickly deliver streaming video in seconds. I would also say that when video compression quality increased was an extra 1-up life for Flash. A video stream in Flash is more stable, clear, and sharper than the older methods of embedding media (Quicktime, Windows Media, Real Player) which could take forever to buffer or download.

Then, we come to sites that gave Flash its bad stigma at the start. Websites that use Flash just for the hell of it, with no added function or grace. The Metallica site is 80% flash, why? They could have easily coded a stylesheet switcher in PHP and achieved the same effect. Even the callouts down the right side are all Flash based, when they could just as easily have been a GIF or JPG. The Deftoneswebsite is just a few links and some text effects. Honestly, I could throw all that down in XHTML/CSS in probably 3/4ths of the time it took Donk to do that in Flash. The third site… yeah. Just terrible. These are websites a user/fan would visit a few times a week, and if it were updated regularly, they’d visit daily.

I can understand some of the motive behind why the Deftones site was done the way it was, when I started out designing in Photoshop I would translate what I had into Flash for Deron Miller, The Murder Cadence (no longer exists), and Foreign Objects. But it is a pain in the ass to manage sites built this way and I eventually moved on to XHTML/CSS/CFML/PHP website development.

So, where to now?

Adobe AIR

AIR is intended to be a very versatile runtime environment, as it allows existing Flash or HTML and JavaScript code to be re-used to construct a more traditional desktop-like program. Adobe positions it more so as a browserless runtime for rich internet applications (RIAs) that can be deployed onto the desktop, rather than a fully-fledged application framework. The differences between each deployment paradigm provides both advantages and disadvantages over both. For example a rich internet application deployed in a browser does not require installation, while one deployed with AIR requires the application be packaged, digitally signed, and installed to the users local file system.

Um, what? We are knee-deep into the Web 2.0, SAAS (Software as a Service), browser based application era, one which aims to replace desktop apps with access-anywhere-from-your-browser apps (Gmail, Gmaps, Google Docs, etc). I can’t see the reasoning for developing tools that would lead us back to the old days, where we need to download full applications and use them- and more importantly, developed in the resource intensive Flash environment. I had hoped desktop widgets were just a passing fad because they serve no more purpose than to eat up free RAM. Honestly, AIR is taking off so slow that in 2-3 years I can’t see this being a viable product anymore, especially with its absurd costs for its SDKs and extensions.

The Web 2.0 revolution came through mostly in part to being able to do desktop tasks from a web interface. I’d hate to see a reversal in this movement.

From a fellow developer:

From a engineering perspective, the AIR runtime is simply a proprietary web browser (that uses WebKit) slapped together with the Flash and SQLite runtimes… It’s just a way to let web developers make their applications “appear” to be desktop applications.

So what if the AIR application has their own OS window? Your application is still sandboxed [almost] as much as a web application, with little or no ability to interact with the OS. And so what if I can start the app from my “Start Menu”…I have bookmarks in my web browser that work just the same.

Not impressed.

I’d have to agree.

See also: 6 Reasons Not To Use Flash on Your Website, Why Flash is Mostly Bad