Flash owns rich internet applications, and the Flex framework is where I spend a lot of my time now. But I still do projects for clients in Flash like banner ads (using Greensock’s Tweening Platform), online presentations, and interactive widgets.
Since I am good at Flash, I tend to favor it over JavaScript for cranking out those rotating banners and such. However, it is neat to see what things are now being done via JavaScript where there used to be a SWF. And it is good for those skilled with Flash to ask the question of whether a SWF is still the best choice for these things.
Apple’s iTunes countdown is the example that prompted this post. When I saw it I was curious about how it worked. Here’s the 53×6180 png file.
Sure enough, the banner works on the iPhone. Although the animation is considerably less smooth on my iPhone 3GS than it is on my 3-year-old MacBook Pro (with a hard reset of the iPhone just to be sure.)
When Flash Player 10.1 is out on other mobile devices it will be interesting to see how it performs with animation like this.
Curious Find is the website of Jamie McDaniel, a freelance iOS developer located in Lexington, Kentucky.
That’s really interesting. Flash is a great catch-all technology. But it has competition at the low end (transitions etc like this which can easily be done in JavaScript and the up and coming html5 video) and high end (tech-pushing 3d done better by Unity).
Unity is as proprietary as Flash so the high end is safer for now, but with open source standards based JavaScript methods to create all these basic effects, and with JavaScript and not Flash working on Apples mobile devices – an ecosystem that dominates the mobile market and imagination – I’d say it’s better to do this type of work in JavaScript whenever possible and if it makes sense for that project.