There’s no place like Flash
Over the years, I’ve gone back and forth with my love and hatred of Flash. I can attribute it to one of the founding reasons I started in the field of Web Design. With a 30-day free trial that ran out all too fast, I created some of the worst looking timeline-driven pieces of art I have ever seen. But, I was hooked.I began taking a Web Design class at school and got to play with Flash 5 on a Mac. Thinking back, I remember it being a horribly slow and painful process. Once I learned of the beauty of CSS and the glorious XHTML 1.1 standard, I threw flash by the Wayside and began work that led to my current work position and attendance at the Art Institute of Portland.Only recently did I hear about this new Flash. This, beast of a program that is dipping further and further into the world of Raster. I was intrigued. I vaguely remember opening Flash MX and apparently missed Flash MX 2004. But Flash 8… now there was a site for sore eyes. It appeared as though the first time I’d seen Flash. It did everything I could dream of and more. It now handles motion detections from input devices, it tweens blurs and best of all – it’s scripting was totally different from my run-ins with Flash 5.In my classes, I started playing with scripting and enjoying nearly every second of it. My heart, though, was still rooted in standards-based layouts and searchable, well-formed code. Flash just can’t offer it, but it could offer animation! Until, of course, I was treated to AJAX – the Web 2.0 revolution. Finally, browsers wanted to support Javascript and finally, I decided to learn it. Now I’m a javascript animation fanatic. I love coming across anything Flash-esque done in Javascript and I love making it myself.So, I was back to not believing Flash was worth very much. And just today, I was treated by a friend to Flash’s scaling behavior. I had no idea, but you can actually tell Flash what to scale when the stage gets larger and what not to. Well, that did it, I’ve fallen back in love and I think this is a relationship built to last.You may check out my first page scaling test and see what I mean. Hot, right?I guess you can expect to see me running with some more Flash and trying to forget its short-comings. I’ve accepted them, but I don’t want to remember them. After all, there’s no place like Flash.