Posts Tagged ‘Flash’

Interactive Charts: Flash on the Retreat

Monday, August 16th, 2010

Everyone seems to be having a go at Flash these days. Steve Jobs rants about it, HTML5 fans look down on it, browsers are taking steps to shield themselves from some of its more buggy aspects.

Firefox is the latest browser to corral Flash to lessen crashes. Version 3.6.4 allowed only 10 seconds grace to unresponsive plugins before terminating them. Version 3.6.6 grants a more generous 45 seconds. Some say this time extension was granted with Flash in mind, because it “routinely hangs on for more than 10 seconds without crashing.”

Flash is facing stiff opposition from a combination of HTML5, CSS3 and various JavaScript frameworks. Early adopters are pushing these technologies to extraordinary lengths. Steve Dennis created an animated version of Twitter’s “Fail Whale” illustration, using only CSS3. Jacob Seidelin used Javascript, Canvas and Ajax to recreate Wolfenstein 3D in a browser. Apple has a Safari-only showcase of online video, audio and animation, with not a .swf to be seen.

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Posted in usability | 3 Comments »

Streaming Video - Still a no go area?

Tuesday, November 7th, 2006

In recent months, the issue of streaming video has been at the forefront of the web community’s conscience. This is due to the huge growth of sites like YouTube, which Google recently acquired for $1.65 billion, and the new phenomenon of clip-sharing and disposable video. YouTube recently rose to notoriety in Ireland when footage of a girl being attacked in Ballymun was posted on the site. The clip was subsequently removed when the victim’s father made an appeal on the Joe Duffy radio show. (more…)

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Posted in The Irish Perspective, accessibility, standards, usability | Comments Off

“Gauges, meters, and traffic lights” - the digital dashboard

Monday, April 10th, 2006

The term “dashboard” has many associations in computing. A lot of users have only become familiar with the term by using Apple’s desktop widget program. However, the term is traditionally used to refer to a screen that offers the user a “bird’s eye view” of something through tables, charts or text. It is often used in content management systems or tools such as wordpress, blogger or jira. (more…)

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Can Flash be considered accessible?

Monday, February 6th, 2006

In 1996, Macromedia purchased vector-based animation program, FutureSplash from FutureWave Software, and began to redistribute it as Flash 1.0.

As the program developed, it became more suited to interactive and visually appealing web content. Unfortunately this development also meant that web users with accessibility difficulties were left behind. Flash was completely inaccessible to almost all those using assistive technologies. (more…)

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Posted in accessibility, standards, usability | 2 Comments »

Flash - Are We There Yet?

Thursday, April 7th, 2005

“Most Flash designers are thinking about how to make things cool, not how to make things accessible (to the disabled). That’s because in the past, Flash was not good for accessibility”, said Chris MacGregor, editor of Flash portal and e-zine Flazoom, April 23, 2002. (more…)

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