For the longest time Flash developers, designers, and animators have dealt with many hardships. With Flash 5 the world was plagued by heavy animations that were a direct result of the Flash’s lack of scalability. Back then coding in Flash was nearly impossible and most developers used one giant timeline to manage their projects. Flash was very cool then and we all thought we could get away with large file sizes so long as the animation was kick ass. In fact, the animation was so kick ass that it ruined the industry. SEO and SEM advocates teamed up and started blogging about how useless Flash was… unfortunately everyone believed them. For the most part, back then, it was true. Flash was a pile of crap in designer clothes.
As the industry started to change, Flash became more accessible and Flash developers smarter. During the web 2.0 boom, while the SEO and SEM guys weren’t looking, the Flash guys and Javascript guys teamed up to build a more scalable version of Flash. Adobe has always been focused on interface and language instead of optimization and scalability so the Flash world had to take matters into its own hands. Scripts like SWFAddress and SWFObject were built to enhance the UX of Flash websites and make them behave more like HTML. This was a Giant leap for Flash. If I recall, it was around that time we first conceived the idea for nGn. After SWFObject was adopted by Adobe as the official way to embed Flash movies in HTML, many other plugin developers released similar products and enhancements. Mind you all this was happening behind the scenes. With the release of SWFAddress, Flash was now accessible but the SEO and SEM guys continued to bad mouth it on blogs. The world had forgotten about Flash.
Flash is rapidly making its comeback and with all that internet money invested in web 2.0 wannabes many people are still in denial and refuse to acknowledge Flash as the leading technology for the future of the internet. With Flash Player now available on touch screen devices and most likely being released for the iPhone in the not so distant future, animated, mutli-touch, interactive websites will be achieved via Flash. Scalability and optimization issues will become the problem of Javascript and HTML guys attempting to make their sites behave like Flash. Flash will become the new way to get a touchable web service up and running quickly.
To kick start this revolution, Jesse Freeman (@TheFlashBum) , released FCSS yesterday. FCSS is a quick and easy way to use CSS for Flash Object attributes and layouts. This amazing library allows us to treat Flash Objects as if they were HTML tags and use CSS to manipulate those Object just as we would in HTML. This is only the beginning, as Flash becomes more and more available and accessible to developers, more libraries like this will be released. With The Open Screen Project and its 10 million USD backing the Flash Developement industry, I think we will see many interactive, animated, accessible websites being released that have minimal load times and lack none of the W3C standard functionality. FCSS is another giant leap for Flash, thanks FlashBum, we love you.
