Showing posts tagged flash

John C. Abell, referring to the debate over Flash on the iPhone/iPad, notes:

[Flash is] the most over-rated and overused crutch for decent design.

And in one phrase, he has entirely summed up my feelings regarding Flash, both as a technology and as a tool for design.

While good design can be (and occasionally is) done using Flash, all too often something is made all whiz-bang-whirry, fly around the screen and do crazy shit-like just because it can. And this doesn’t make the interface more usable, and most definitely doesn’t make it better designed.

Flash just helps to ensure the design will be noticed1. And good design shouldn’t be noticed, nor should it get in the way of the user. As Jared Spool remarks:

Good design, when it’s done well, becomes invisible. It’s only when it’s done poorly that we notice it.

And boy do I notice a lot of Flash out there.

  1. I’m sure this point has been made before, but isn’t the name Flash itself so apropos? Technically it’s a contraction of FutureSplash, the company that originally created the technology. But anymore, all I see is the derisive meaning of the word… ↩

Flash Trash

Did you know that Flash can store cookies on your computer, separate from your browser? And that these cookies are much more likely to be used for nefarious means? Not to mention they’re more difficult to delete (well, technically it’s not more difficult to delete them, just much less obvious).

Another reason to dump Flash entirely (I use the excellent ClickToFlash for Safari/Webkit and FlashBock for Firefox).

(via Wolf Rentzsch and John Gruber)