To Flash or not to Flash

Thanks to Steve Jobs and Apple, developers have started to question if we should use flash at all on our websites. Currently you can use javascript to accomplish a lot of the same things and for more complex animations html5 is available. But currently html5 is still in very early stages which means although you can do a lot of neat things, html5 is still in testing phases and there may be many changes to come. Beyond that there are lots of designers who specialize in flash which has been a fairly standard format for years. Pretty much all browsers in the past have supported flash.

Enter the Iphone and Ipad Dilemma

Well Steve Jobs decided in order to push his own agenda of killing Flash he won't support it with the Iphone and Ipad devices. There is much debate on whether they have the right to do this. Some say it's their company and product and they can do what they want. This is true to an extent but the public isn't completely dumb either. He blames Adobe for this problem and says it's their fault for having a buggy and power hungry product. According to Apple Flash just can't run on the Iphone/Ipad. Well currently Android phones and many others can run Flash without many issues as described by Steve.

So what's the deal? Maybe Flash does drain your battery quickly and although this is a problem, shouldn't the user of the device have the choice to run their battery down? Well without adding too much more fire to the debate, where does this leave us?

Personally I have never advised clients to use flash. If you can accomplish a slideshow using javascript I always suggest that over flash. If you can have pop-ups, fade-ins, etc. Without flash it always makes sense to do it without it. Flash isn't as search engine friendly either. So overall it makes sense not to use flash when possible. But with all of this standing against flash people still have many 'flashy' (no pun intended) uses for it. Lots of ads using mini-animations use flash.

A way to degrade gracefully

So we see many problems with using flash but we would still like to use it and have ways to get around all of these problems that Steve Jobs has introduced to the equation. Well currently I don't know of many solutions other than trying to create an html5 solution. The good news is there is a plugin I recently ran across called smokescreen that appears to have a solution to this problem. Basically what this does is convert your flash swf into it's html5 alternative on the fly. So in other words if someone supports flash on their browser then they see the flash version, but if they don't then they can see the same animation in html5. This sounds great, but of course the bad news right now is that Smokescreen is currently in closed beta. So I guess we'll have to sit back and wait for this alternative to come to life. Once an alternative like this is released to the public we'll have a way to continue creating flash without having to worry about this debate and who can see our flash swf.

I still believe flash should be used sparingly to all the alternatives available, but unfortunately there still isn't a viable solution to all the great things flash can do. So we'll have to slowly ween ourselves off of it until the future catches up with the past.