RE: FLASH: does SIZE mattter?

[Cummins, Rob]

> > Are you a Director user by any chance?

> 

> Ayuh. Why?

> 

Well, no, offence.... <starts another Flash/Director Jihad>, but I've

observed that many Director users find it difficult to make the transition

from a broadband multimedia environment (CD) to the demanding restrictions

of a narrow band environment...


I think the "have we filled the CD" mentality is still there at the back of

some peoples' minds.


For example, I went to a DUG meeting a while back, and they were discussing

the future of Director, and it's application on the web. A developer callled

Andy White was demoing his new ADSL (broad band internet connectivity) work

for British Telecom. Although Andy wasn't really at fault, (having to

basically stick tho the brief of "use all the bandwidth") he had done a very

old school, Director-esque website... Which used hundreds of pre-rendered

images simply to represent a Drag & drop object, had eleven different themes

for exactly the same content, and just generally built a site which totally

wasted the opportunity that ADSL presents. The Director/CD-ROM era mentality

of "we must use all the space provided" leads, in my opinion, to bloated,

inefficent, badly thought out projects, which end up unnecessessarily

consuming precious resources...


It's an easy trap to fall into, and web designers often suffer from the

equivalent "we must do every cool trick we can just to show that we can"

mentality. The lesson of function over form is a hard one to learn, and has

often been learned at the expense of many peoples egos (I'm sure we've all

seen it). We must be mindful, as broadband approaches, not to do what web

designers have done in the past, by adding unnecessary bloat and cruft

simply because we can. An elegant 60k flash site will still load many times

faster on a 2meg link than on a 56k, and we should be trying to reduce wait

time, not taking the Microsoft style bloat-media route, where we expect

people to constantly upgrade as we do more and more sloppy functionality

design...


Anyway, I think I've ranted enough... Don't take this as an attack on

anyone, or any kind of personal  affront, I'm merely sharing my opinions on

the lessons that have been learned in the Multimedia industry, and pointing

out some mistakes of the past so that we can learn from them.



Alias|Rob

prplx.com-design for the perplexed



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