Public tests new version of Flash player

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Well...

i]"The key value of the Flash player is that you go to content on the Web and it works. And we don't want to break anything."


Not exactly. Most of the time it works. Sometimes it fails miserably to work.

Had a fellow in to see me yesterday about some advertising. He wanted me to take a look and critique his Website, which another outfit had done. Virtually everything's done in Flash. Site navigation, photo gallery (he's in real estate, so photos are crucial to the sale)--the works. Really, it's just an extensive Flash application with a few shreds of HTML wrapped around it.

Most of it worked OK on my Linux workstation in Firefox with the Flash 7 plugin. However, on the crucial Featured Properties photo gallery, a good chunk of the page fails to render, cutting his photos (and text boxes) in half vertically. Weird. Just a big, white hole where there should be the other half of the photos and text. You can see the left half of all his properties, and read the first 20 words or so of every line of text in his property descriptions. But that's all. I was amused.

Not just a Linux problem, either. He tells me that his laptop (running IE6 in XP) will fail to render the thumbnail images in one area on his home page that links to the main gallery, even after Flash's cute little progress bar says "100% loaded." Not crucial to navigation, but it sure looks silly. Meanwhile, he tells me that his XP desktop (also running IE6) seems to render and work everything just fine.

The heck of it is, everything could have been done just as well in DHTML and I'd bet a whole lot of money that it would render and function correctly in a whole lot of browsers on a whole bunch of platforms.

There's only thing I would have had a bit of trouble recreating on the guy's site without Flash: His splash page animation with music. I could do something similar; it just wouldn't have been quite so slick. I'm pretty sure that this was the main reason his Webmaster chose to do the site in Flash: so he could do some AV eye candy on the splash page. You know what? His nifty little opening dance number had absolutely nothing to do with real estate, this fellow's Website function, the client's public personna as a realtor...nor does it say a darned thing about his company. In other words, probably the entire reason for using Flash was to stroke the Webmaster's ego ("LOOK! I, too, can do meaningless Flash stuff just like 67,238,815 other Webmasters!!!").

Flash is just swell in certain applications. Bear in mind that the more involved your Flash app is, the less likely it is to function properly across a range of browsers and platforms. Interestingly, sometimes it doesn't even seem to work consistently across the same OS and browser.

Posted by: Yen_z   Posted on: 07/12/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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