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Flash is more than toys
Flash is more than toys
Posted Jan 12, 2006 4:49 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)Parent article: Flash players for Linux
Well actually beyond the silly ads and such, I found that our workplace has moved to putting training material, training movies, and other things in flash because it is the most cross-platform. This seems to be a trend in organizations with mixed IT formats.
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Posted Jan 12, 2006 8:25 UTC (Thu) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]
Yeah, though no-one really sane person will start to extensively use a non-open non-standard format, which has only one company's player that can be used to play the content (and that one company actively tries to prevent the development of eg. free software counterparts by denying the use of specs to develop players etc.)
Most companies limit the use of Flash to advertising and product informations, and many companies even understand that is often stupid to do even that with Flash - for pure advertising it might be okay, but product pages are basically always harder to use, harder to find (google) if they are done in Flash.
competency vs insanity
Posted Jan 13, 2006 16:49 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link]
"though no-one really sane person will start to extensively use a non-open non-standard format"
The majority of IT people do just that every single day, and there's no question of their sanity. Quite the opposite, I'd argue that only an insane person would avoid the use of a very powerful tool simply out of unfounded fears of the tool suddenly ceasing to work anytime during the lifetime of the material in question.
Openness is useful, *very* useful, but it is still just one point out of many to look at when evaluating a technology. In many circumstances the efficiency of some proprietary tool is going to be worth a lot more to a particular project than openness. Part of being a competent (and sane) IT worker is being able to make those sorts of objective evaluations and coming up with the best solution, not just the most open solution.
Flash is more than toys
Posted Jan 12, 2006 14:41 UTC (Thu) by jquinn (subscriber, #605) [Link]
Flash is more than just animation and graphics and sound too. I don't see much mention in any of these comments about Flash Remoting.
I use Flash Remoting extensively at work. I don't use animations much. Rather I create forms and communicate with a back end, in my case a J2EE server. Flash can use Java objects (POJO or EJBs), Web Services, or .Net/C# objects.
In this area, it's a lot like AJAX. Flash has two advantages over AJAX: ubiquity and robustness. It has one major disadvantage: freedom.
The ubiquity can be attested to by the fact that there are so many ads that use it, and by the fact that the Open Source world sees it as an itch that needs scratching. Arguably though, Flash is more WORA than Javascript. (This is mainly due to a certain browser manufacturer's inability to comply with standards). Robustness involvesd the animation/audio/video apabilites. The main disadvantage, freedom, the ability to create content on free platforms, is being addressed by Flash4Linux, but slowly.
Freedom requires an open spec
Posted Jan 13, 2006 23:29 UTC (Fri) by nealmcb (guest, #20740) [Link]
"The main disadvantage, freedom, the ability to create content on free platforms, is being addressed by Flash4Linux, but slowly. "
But the spec is still controlled by a proprietary company, right?
It is hard to experience much freedom when someone else can change the rules at any time. On the other hand, the SVG spec is under the change-control of W3c - a much freer situation. Why play the bait-and-switch and bait-and-switch game over and over? Open formats are critical.