Flash’s Weaknesses: Then and Now

Back in 2003 Mark Angeletti wrote an article for Sitepoint titled Flash Vs. CSS/HTML: Which Will You Choose?, in which he examined the strengths and weaknesses of Flash. Mark closed his article by suggesting that in the future Macromedia had the opportunity to fix Flash’s weaknesses, and would likely do so. I thought it would be interesting to look at how much progress has been made in the past four years, and see if those weaknesses have indeed been addressed, or if there is still work to be done.

Continue reading

Elastic Flash with scrollbars

In the past couple of years it has been common for Flash developers to design elastic sites, rather than sites with fixed dimensions. These elastic sites fill the browser window, and content is positioned programatically on the stage according to the size of the viewport. The trouble with this approach is that because the width and height of the embedded Flash swf are set to 100%, the browser will never display scrollbars. If the user sizes their browser window too small then content will begin to disappear off screen. Due to the lack of scrollbars, this hidden content is inaccessible to the user.

By writing a small JavaScript function that is triggered when the window is resized, we can overcome this restriction. When the window size is detected to be smaller than a minimum width/height specified by the designer, the Flash movie will stop scaling, and scrollbars will be forced to appear.

Continue reading

DeepLink: Flash deep linking class

The inability to bookmark ‘deep’ content has long been an accessibility criticism leveled at Flash. In fact, with a bit of Javascript and Actionscript trickery it is possible to create bookmarkable URLs that provide direct access to a Flash movie’s internal content. And with the introduction of the ExternalInterface class in Flash 8, this two way communication between Javascript and Flash just got a lot easier.

Inspired by the work of Theo Hultberg and Asual, I have developed a simple Flash class that demonstrates the implementation of deep linking in a Flash movie. While I don’t propose that my DeepLink class should be used as a substitute for Ausual’s excellent SWFAddress, it might provide a useful building block for exploring what the ExternalInterface class is capable of.

Continue reading

A Flash perspective on PHP releases

It strikes me as odd that the uptake of PHP5 has been so slow. The snail’s pace at which web hosts are migrating to PHP5 has been hampered not by lack of user interest, but because a few popular PHP applications (OSCommerce, for one) break under PHP5. In this respect, I suppose the web host’s hands are tied.

Continue reading

Flash Player 9 released

Adobe Flash Player 9 is available to download now from the Adobe website. The big news about this version of the player is it’s support for Actionscript 3, the new version of the Flash programming language.

Continue reading