Brian Crescimanno

One thing I don't understand is that how in 2009 people are still put off by the use of Flash.  Seemingly dozens of frameworks have popped up to do animation using anything but Flash and none of them as well suited to the task as Flash itself.  There's no need to recount the gross evils perpetrated in the late-90's and early 2000's by over-zealous marketers using Flash so we can all understand where the disdain comes from.  But today I want to ask, why does it persist?

The 37Signals Blog, Signal vs. Noise, featured a post today about the new Backpack website.  In this article, the author expresses surprise that Jason, the head of 37Signals, was not opposed to using Flash on one of their websites:

It is funny looking back on suggesting Flash for the Backpack homepage. I was a bit embarrassed. Flash is such a dirty word especially when it comes to the audience reading this blog.

Also, in the comments, you find:

Wow. You guys are developing a pretty strong reality distorting field !

and

Why didn’t you just make the final product an animated GIF (instead of using Flash on the site)?

With Flash market penetration rivaling even Javascript, why is there this notion that Flash is inherently bad?  As a big proponent of Flex, I've written previously about the near-ubiquity of Flash player.  With Adobe taking Flash accessibility more seriously, and many resources availble for Flash SEO, it seems that most of the common objections are becoming obsolete. Perhaps the most compelling argument that Flash is truly mainstream is that (as of this writing) Alexa cites YouTube, a site whose primary content is served via Flash player, as the number 3 most visited website globally.

As someone who is a big fan of Adobe Flex and the possibilities it presents, I truly hope that this dislike of Flash disappears sooner rather than later.

Technorati: accessibility, flash, flex, seo

I've been reading technical books for years on topics ranging from beginning programming guides with C to Adobe Photoshop tips and tricks.  Like most people in this field, I've long been a fan of O'Reilly books (I think my first one was a Perl 5 book somewhere around the 1999 timeframe).  However; recently, I've been hearing some negative things about their books and haven't really picked any up.  My most recent one is a several-editions old version of Javascript: The Definitive Guide.

I was also a fan of the Pragmatic Programmers Agile Web Development With Rails that I managed to purchase just at the wrong time--about 2 weeks before Rails 2.0 was released.  While the book was well written, it has been less than helpful with regard to learning to use Rails.

Despite these (and other) gems, I think most agree that technical books suffer from a lot of problems and are generally very poorly done.   I'm happy to say that I've found my most recent technical book purchase, Adobe Flex 3: Training From the Source to be among the best technical books I've read in many years.  It follows the paradigm of taking you step-by-step through building an application--and does so in such a way that it is easy for novice Flex developers to follow; and at the same time allowing more experienced developers to skip over details that aren't needed.  The book is organized into 26 "Lessons" each adding to the features of the application and employing new concepts.  One of the great parts about these Lessons is that each of them begins with a summary page that gives solid insight into what topics will be covered, and a surprisingly accurate estimate of how long the Lesson will take to complete.

If you're looking to get into Flex development, I highly recommend this title from Adobe.

Amazon: Adobe Flex 3: Training from the Source

Technorati: adobe, books, flex, oreilly

Adobe today announced the creation of the Open Screen Project to help facilitate the adoption of Flash and Flash-based technologies on a wide range of platforms. There's plenty of coverage out there today about this initiative--and it's no surprise. For years developers have been calling for an opening up of Flash and it looks like Adobe is ready to give it to us.

The big takeaway: Developers are now free to create their own versions of Flash Player.

First, this is fantastic news for the open source community and projects like Ubuntu who now have the opportunity to create a true "free software" version of the Flash player. Free software purists around the world rejoice!

But there's more to it than just Free Software. Apple's current SLA for the iPhone SDK would not allow Adobe's Flash Player to be ported to the iPhone platform (barring special exception, which I'm not entirely convinced Apple would be unwilling to give). Could Apple develop its own version of Flash Player optimized for the iPhone? The Open Screen Project certainly looks that way--and I honestly can't help but wonder if that's part of the reason Adobe's decided that now is the proper time to announce this project. Given the number of partners (and the conspicuous-in-their-absence-Apple) I'd hesitate to say that the iPhone SDK was a cause for this action; but it certainly may have influenced the timing. One thing's for certain; it very much puts the ball back into Apple's court on the issue of Flash on the iPhone.

I am one of the camp that believes Apple has no interest in seeing Flash on the iPhone. Flash competes too directly with a major Apple technology--Quicktime--for Apple to want to see it there. That said, with the onus now on Apple with regard to Flash on the iPhone, I think the boys at Adobe might have out-maneuvered ol' Steve on this one.

And that might be the most impressive part of it all.

Technorati: adobe, air, apple, flash, flex, iPhone, iPhone SDK, open screen project

For the first time in a long time, I feel like it's actually for me to start blogging again--it's not that I have some conceited notion that the world actually wants to hear what I have to say.  It's more that after moving to AutoTrader.com in November, I feel like I've really found some direction.  All of my previous attempts at starting a blog focused (at least, in my mind) on my own design abilities.  Having found myself at ATC, I've come to accept a pretty sensible truth:  I am not an artist.  

Certainly I have some Visual Design skills; but they are not my strong suit.  My focus has always been on User Experience an Interaction Design and the best way for me to achieve those goals is to focus on User Centric development practices as an extension of User Centric Design.  It's with this mentality that I've chosen simply to install Wordpress, grab a theme I thought was nice, and get to the more important aspect of writing a Blog--actually writing it!

I'm back in Atlanta this week after attending the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco April 22-25.  The Expo was, for lack of a better description, a mixed bag.  Duane Nickull and James Ward of Adobe opened the conference for us on Tuesday with an Adobe Flex Boot Camp session which set a rather high bar in terms of conference sessions. Needless to say, after seeing the potential of Flex first hand, I quickly downloaded the Flex Builder 60-day trial and have been running through tutorials since I got back.   As my colleague Neil Green put it to me, "this shit sells itself"--and he was 100% correct.  When we look at Flash version penetration numbers, what we see is that over 98% of systems have Flash Player 8 or better.  What does this mean?  In the simplest terms:

• More people have Flash than have Javascript enabled
• More people have Flash than use any single version of any web browser
• More people have Flash than use any version of any web browser

In my opinion, those are some pretty staggering numbers.  Factor in that the Flash Player will render these SWF files identically on the 3 major platforms--under any browser--and you have a very compelling argument in favor of Flex-based development for the front end.  Especially given that my primary role at ATC over the past 7 months has been as an Ajax developer and my continuing battles with multiple browsers' disparate support for CSS...you get the picture.  Technology like Flex looks pretty good in the face of all of that.

What have you heard about Flex?  What do you see as the advantages and the drawbacks?  Are you looking at implementing it in your organization?    Basically--I've been sold on the idea of Flex; but I'd love to hear the downsides that I'm certain I'm overlooking (and let's try to avoid the "more obvious than obvious" things like "it's proprietary" and "it requires a plugin").  Thanks--that'd be great!

Technorati: ajax, css, flash, flex, javascript, meta, web20expo