Ask HN: What is the deal with hating Flash? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the deal with hating Flash?

2 pointswillheim2 comments

I am in the process of building a RIA that will involve various media types and creating an interactive presentation out of them. We are doing it in Flash. It's faster and simpler to code with a universal support by desktop systems where this app is targeted to be used. In discussing it with the various digerati as oon as Flash is mentioned it's like I've stepped in dog poo and noses get all scrunched up. There simply isn't an elegant HTML5 solution for this task at the time. I'd be happy to support the iPad and Jobs mafia in the future when this all gets cleared up but, as we've seen, a great majority of Flash dependent applications (Youtube and their interactions, Viddler and their comment system, and recently Grooveshark and their actual file player) cannot be done in anything but Flash if they're to be as interactive and reliable.

Am I wrong? Has anyone seen any really good interactive multimedia RIAs done in something outside Flash?

Good question.

Personally, I used to love flash, but they kept adding crap to it and the IDE environment kept getting crappier and crappier (in my experience), that it became more of a PITA than a benefit, and that was even before iOS.

For sure, in the right hands, and for the right things, it's a powerful multimedia tool, especially for desktop interactive presentations. I've built many such things in Flash (and Director!) myself.

Some advice: Go ahead and use Flash, but treat it like the component it is. Don't do your entire UI in Flash, just use it for media playback, and even then as a fallback for when HTML5 standards don't work on a given user's platform of choice. That way when things really get going, you don't have an entire application to re-write. For sure the main platform that will still be around in 10 years will be the web.

JavaScript isn't that much different from ActionScript, DOM elements aren't that much different from MovieClips.

I expect we are about to see really good interactive multimedia in the browser. As a fellow tool-builder, I've got something cooking myself. Curious about your project, any details you can share about why you feel Flash is essential?

People dont like flash because it takes long to load, make for slow and unresponsive ui's, consumes lots of cpu, ruins vast amounts of basic usability and is generally a bad player in the web department.

Flash is not required for reliable and interactive interface, it is needed however to deal with multimedia reliably, so when people look down for using flash, just tell them you cant do what you need to with current web standards. Looking to the future I think its pretty unarguable that people should be looking to move to web standards when they are reliably available

Reply on news.ycombinator.com