Re: FLASH Dance

At 7:06 AM 3/12/99, Starr Wolf wrote:
> FLASH ... (yes, that again) ... why hasn't it taken off better than it has
> thus far?  It has been around long enough now but I haven't seen much growth
> among its use with designers and the Net is void of many sites using it.

Hmm. I'd have to wonder what "taking off" might mean, then? It's now
viewable by the majority of consumers, without additional downloads:
http://www.flash.com/survey/

The number of Flash sites listed by HotBot is currently at over 25,000...
go to http://www.hotbot.com, to "Advanced Search", and check for file type
of ".swf".

For high-profile sites, your best source is the Shocked Site of the Day...
this week's profiles include Jeep Grand Cherokee, the Sci-Fi Channel, and
c|net:
http://www.macromedia.com/shockzone/ssod/

The designer community is increasing greatly... the Flash newsgroup split
into two a few months back, and the main group is still hundreds of
messages per day:
news://forums.macromedia.com/macromedia.flash

Designers are definitely coming up with new techniques and breakthrough
"looks"... a great resource is John Croteau's FlashZone (check those
examples!):
http://www.flashzone.com/flas/effects.html

Flash animations are inspiring a new form of online gallery, that drives
traffic... the first link here shows relative rankings of site visits, and
the others are mainstream galleries:
http://100hot.com/home.chtml  (notice Macromedia at 15th-most-visited)
http://www.shockrave.com/
http://www.hotwired.com/animation/
http://www.real.com/showcase/animation/index.html

Then there's the new OpenSWF foundation, which coordinates efforts among
third-party developers creating new utilties with the SWF format:
http://www.openswf.org/

Major developers such as Quark are starting to support direct SWF export
too, as shown by their announcements at Seybold.

Is there any particular yardstick you're looking for that would help you in
pursuing this type of work...?




Travis Wall wrote:
> Platform compatibility, its irritating writing pages for a
> flash/non-flash site.

Are there any particular platforms that you're looking to support? In
addition to the Flash Java Player, there are native-code Flash Players for
WebTV, Linux, BeOS, FreeBSD, HP-Unix, even Amiga. Many of these were
written by third-party developers, based on the Open SWF Specification.
Olivier Debon has led the charge, and you can find more at
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Labyrinth/5084/flash.html

If there's another platform you need to support, then could you drop a vote
in to wish-flash(at)macromedia.com, please? Thanks!



jd



John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US
Search technotes: http://www.macromedia.com/support/search/
Fireworks 2.0 trial available! http://www.getfireworks.com/

Offlist email risks capture by the spam filters. I may not see your
email if it's not on the list. Private one-on-one email options are
available via Priority Access: http://www.macromedia.com/support/

HWG: hwg-graphics mailing list archives, maintained by Webmasters @ IWA