Good bye "Flash"

My, admittedly, "stagnant" website http://www.nizwa.net will become a hit, in a 'history repeats itself' manner!

Since I first built my “real” site back in early 2000 using earlier versions of Macromedia Dreamweaer, many things have evolved and changed over time. I can recall days when HTMl was looked at as an old technique for the less informed webmaster and people had migrated to PhP and ASP for their interactivity and database connectivity, even ColdFusion was no longer a hip in mid 90s!

Being really interested in functional scripts, I tried a few CMS in perl, cgi, php and asp at the time and scripts downloaded mostly from Hotscripts.com (remember the red chilli logo :) ). That's besides the lovely DHTML, which was also a hit for animation at that time, mainly from Dynamicdrive.com. Java was a league on its own, so I never really implemented it myself, it was such a pain to run anyways!

But with the advancement of Web 2.0, things have started to reverse backward, perhaps driven by all the security issues with other scripts, I am just speculating here, but HTML was reborn once again.

The same can be said about JavaScript days when we downloaded the earlier scripts from various free online depositories which were limited anyways, with little modifications, they did wonders for newbies like myself. Move forward 10 years, that same javascript, combined with XML-technically-, is the engine that drive most of the dynamic and interactive social networking sites ever! In Ajax, JavaScript delivered HTML decorated & styled in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). That's an amazing transformation for both, good ol' HTML and JavaScript as far as web development is concerned. Thanks in part to Gmail!

So how about 'Flash'? Well, it was great app when Macromedia had it. I came to learn about it along with Dreamweaver and vector graphic editor Fireworks. I used a lot of ready-made templates when I used flash but never really got around to actually master it, not even as close as Dreamweaver. I was more inclined to use Swish and other flash generating software for my 3D buttons and animated text!

I learned that Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005, which I thought was the end of a great software company and package. I never liked Macromedia to go not to Adobe anyways! Not too long later, few classic Macromedia apps ceased to exist. I was not a huge fan of Adobe, earlier versions of Photoshop was an exception. For one, it was out of reach for many, way too expensive for a regular webmaster really trying to educate the world about agriculture in Oman. I have not used many of its software despite the seemingly helpful ones to a lazy/busy to hand code, like Contribute.

PDF as a world standard was for the longest time monopolized by Adobe till later 'Printer' drivers of PDF came along. Adobe Acrobat Reader was such a pain, took forever to load to read a one page PDF file off the web. I personally switched as soon as alternatives became available Sumatra PDF and Foxit Reader. Those were way faster and light on my Pentium 3 - 4 systems with 1G RAM. It took Adobe 8 versions to make their PDF reader actually useable! No wonder then, Flash, despite its earlier great strides had become such a pain now. This is especially true with the long list of software capable of producing flash "movies" and the flash script - ActionScript. Given my history of dissatisfaction with Adobe to begin with, I do not blame Steve Jobs and the world webmaster for finally coming to closure with Flash as a major element of web design. I find Ajax, JQuery, HTML5 with CSS more appealing and it makes me excited to learn more about them once again. I truly feel happy that my old HTML web site with scanty use of Javascript and my Horizontal navigation bar is hip again!