For the lazy, they’re going to make Flash MX work well with Wine, and if that’s popular, do a native port to Linux. They also mentioned an upcoming package that will do for XML what Dreamweaver does for HTML. That’s unfortunate. 😉
I’ve never made anything in Flash, primarily because I’d have to scrounge a windows box just to mess with it. Secondarily because I suck at art. and Flash is art. Well, it SHOULD be.
Flash can also be used to make very useful web interfaces that aren’t possible with DHTML:
Broadmoor Hotel
Flash Can make great (looking sites) But the issue comes when you try to let people viewing the right way. Some people might not have the flash plug-in installed. The other major thing is that search engine spiders can not crawl flash sites like they to html so often if you do a flash site you should have an html version for the search engines.
I’ve thought long and hard about where and how Flash should be used. I’ve looked into making it database driven, generating it with php, etc.
I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that it’s actually a good replacement for Java on the web page.
I used to love flash, I spent a semester in college working with it. Then I entered the job world. There were all these design companies that had great flash designers. Then I realized that there are two type of sites. Sites that attract users and sites that you send users to. If you need to attract people, the best way is search engines, if you want to use it as a glorified presentation then flash is what you can use. I have used flash with some xml for content management. I would like to hook it up using php and mysql that way you can give a client free reign over content but other wise flash is what is says “its flashy” in a marketing world it has to be justified/.
My favorite use for flash (though I’ve never really seen it) is a self updating widget. Stocks come to mind first, but any data that changes very frequently like sports scores or something, would be perfect for a small flash piece. Especially since you could theoretically move it out of the browser, and make a nice little desktop app.
What was the name of that cool server-push news service that had its own app, back in the 90’s? I loved that thing, but it died. 🙁