As marketers devote bigger portions of their budgets to digital-ad campaigns. Finding ways to cut costs for digital production work is becoming increasingly important. Online campaigns have increased in sophistication and Adobe Flash, benefiting from industry support has risen as the development platform of choice. Actionscript as the skill to have for any developer wishing to create and deliver rich internet content and award winning web experiences.
For the pat 3 years, I have blogged and posted over 300 actionscript experiments. Unfortunately, I have come to realize that the path the language has taken is going opposite to the markets needs. It now costs more to develop digital-ad campaigns using flash, not to mention the amount of skilled resources and time necessary to pull off the simplest of sites.
Yet those sites remain closed sandboxes to SEO searchbots and Accessibility standards. I personally believe that flash has become over-sophisticated, too broad in its possibilities and saturated.
Over the last 6 moths I have had the privilege to lead the development efforts on Palm.com The brand's rebirth and introduction of their much awaited revolutionary Palm Pre and webOS platform. A platform based on the HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript standards.
For someone who is a basically a good coder/developer, learning another programming language is not going to be a big deal. I decided time had come to do the big swicth, move away form flash and head towards Javascript and AJAX. ... yeah, Javascript, the one responsible for sophisticated web applications such as Gmail and Maps.
In the coming weeks/months I will be redefining Reflektions.com| Miniml and pushing it towards new boundaries. Visitors will be able to benefit from my experiments in Flash and in Javascript with full explanation of how these experiments work.
If you are making a living coding in flash or if Javascript is your language of choice, reflektions.com| miniml will become a resource to sharpen your ECMAScript skills and allow our industry to benefit from a mature alternative.
Stay tuned, more to come...
posted by Paul Ortchanian in actionscript (47) | Comments (15) |
chris said...
your palm pre link is broken (404). as is, in my opinion, your synopsis. good developers chose the right technology for the job, based on project goals. saying Javascript and AJAX is the appropriate choice for all digital-ad campaigns is a weird choice and a blanket statement. Javascript and AJAX may be the appropriate choice some of the time, as Flash may be some of the time. and sometimes a combination may be appropriate.
your post makes it seem like the two technologies must be mutually exclusive. an odd view, in my opinion.
montana said...
awesome, I've longed been scoffed at in the early days for my love of javascript and was using "ajax" in 2001 with foxpro applications. Can't wait to see what comes our way from your site Paul. Others interested may want to take a look at http://javascript.crockford.com/
Douglas Crockford's (JSLint + developer of JSON) website with some really interesting insights into the language. According to him...
>> From: "Douglas Crockford"
>> To: "Montana *****"
>> Sent: Monday, December 29, 2008 3:52:34 PM GMT -08:00 Tijuana / Baja California
>> Subject: Re: your thoughts on adobe's AS3 ECMAScript implementation?
>>
>> AS3 is not an implementation of ECMAScript. It was inspired by a failed proposal
>> for a radical transformation of ECMAScript.
>>
>> Adobe has a good implementation of ECMAScript. I hope that someday they will put
>> it in Flash.
Lawrie said...
It's sad to see you moving away from Flash, you posted some amazing code, which really helped me when I was starting out.
Hopefully your new direction will now help me branch out into JS.
Tom H said...
Welcome to the world of browser incompatibility and memory leaks :)
I believe the sweet spot is using Flash for what standards based tech can't achieve (yet), such as audio, video, advanced motion graphics and effects; and using JavaScript to control this. Such as a video player with HTML/JS controls (http://icant.co.uk/easy-youtube/)
I'm looking forward to what you have to share with us.
ivo said...
Glad you've seen the light;)
Though the original design and ideas were all about using flash I've favoured Javascript over Flash for www.soundmuseum.fm.
I roughly guess it would have taken me at least twice the amount of time to create the site in Flash.
freddy said...
" It now costs more to develop digital-ad campaigns using flash" how is that?, I'd say it's cheaper than the javascript/ajax alternative as there are more skilled Flash developers around and, it's relatively the same coding, for the most part, if you know javascript you know flash and vise versa, but hey, whatever rocks your boat ;)
Ian said...
Although you've done a great job here it still shows that it's not flash. Non of the clients I work with would be happy with this when compared to what we can achieve with flash - I'm surprised palm were.
william bingham said...
Awesome! I've followed your flash work, now I can't wait to see what you achieve in JS! John Resig is going to have some competition...
ariel sommeria said...
Hi,
I agree with you to some extent, but there are still some quite interesting projects being done trying to keep things simple. Take a look at http://silex-ria.org for example
James+Duncan said...
Hi Paul
Brandon Flowers forwarded me your post here in the TO office. I'm curious about your reference to HTML 5.
Are you saying the new Palm OS...n/m i just clicked on the link to the Palm Dev network lol
Cheers and great post. Welcome to the Standards party btw!
Kelvin Luck said...
As browsers get more powerful and there are more libraries available it's getting easier to use JS in a more experimental mode as well. I just wrote a blog post about some recent
http://www.kelvinluck.com/2009/03/not-my-mothers-javascript/
I'll>experiments:
http://www.kelvinluck.com/2009/03/not-my-mothers-javascript/
I'll look forward to seeing your JS experiments :)
Nikals said...
I think you have nailed it in some ways. I have the feeling that JS is more often then not the way to go these days.
Harry said...
What specifically are the problems with Flash becoming too sophisticated and too broad in its possibilities?
You are the first person who I have heard make a claim that the direction that Flash is going in is the opposite of what the market needs.
What is it that you can do in JavaScript better than Flash? Have you tried Flex?
dim said...
this is great !
James+Sheldon said...
Are you still going to stick with your "experiment" based approach to reflecktions.com.
Looking forward to reading your new JS posts.