{"id":271,"date":"2008-05-01T12:38:06","date_gmt":"2008-05-01T17:38:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/2008\/why-flash-cs3-makes-flash-important\/"},"modified":"2008-05-01T13:04:04","modified_gmt":"2008-05-01T18:04:04","slug":"why-flash-cs3-makes-flash-important","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/2008\/why-flash-cs3-makes-flash-important\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Flash CS3 makes Flash important again &#8211; and this time, it&#8217;s for real!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Up until Flash CS3, I think Flash had been slowly drifting into becoming a niche market technology. But now, Flash CS3 (and the Flash player 9) puts Flash back into the game as an important player. <\/p>\n<p>&#8230; This means that it now makes more sense for web developers to learn Flash technology. I go over some of the details below. <\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>A little background<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I won&#8217;t go into the long <a href=\"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/articles\/articles_FlashUse.htm\">history of Flash<\/a>, since I&#8217;ve briefly covered it elsewhere. But let me just quickly recap that Flash started out as a way to create lightweight interactive animations on the Web. <\/p>\n<p>And then the people in charge of Flash, tried to position it as an alternative to HTML.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230; This did not work out too well.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The death of Flash &#8216;Intros&#8217;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>At one point there was this Flash &#8216;intro&#8217; fad, where web designers forced people watch a Flash animation before they could actually see the website! This we know now, was simply a crazy bad idea. <\/p>\n<p>Once the Flash intro fad died in 2001, Flash slowly slipped into a niche. Most websites didn&#8217;t need animations and Flash was not really easier to work with than HTML and CSS.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Flash CS3 breaths life into Flash <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Now all bets are off, Flash CS3 and the new ultra fast Flash player 9 make Flash (once again) a very important technology on the Web &#8230; and now, even on the desktop!<\/p>\n<p><strong>Flash is actually useful &#8211; for real this time!<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Now Flash has a whole bunch of improvements that make Flash an interesting addition that can complement HTML\/CSS based websites. Flash also provides useful tools that will make developing great Flash based web sites much easier than before. <\/p>\n<p>&#8230; In my opinion, Flash development was too time consuming in the past to be compelling enough for people to want to switch over.<\/p>\n<p><strong>So what are the improvements to Flash CS3?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I won&#8217;t go into too many nerdy details here, but I think I can reduce it to these key points:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Flash development tools now have all the features that programmers expect to have in an IDE.<\/li>\n<li>Actionscript 3 is very powerful and has a rich API that takes a lot of the work out of your hands. <\/li>\n<li>The Flash 9 engine is blazingly fast &#8211; it almost feels like the Flash applications are running at native speed!<\/li>\n<li>Flash now has the Flex framework that allows you to easily build interactive database driven Flash applications very quickly.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>For a Flash designer, these developments may seem boring. But the fact of the matter is that this could spur interest in Flash &#8230;  making both Flash design and Flash programming skills, much more valuable.<\/p>\n<p>Because of these new Flash developments, I&#8217;ve decided to create a whole new section on killersites.com with a bunch of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/flash\/\">Flash tutorials and articles<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks,<\/p>\n<p>Stefan Mischook<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Up until Flash CS3, I think Flash had been slowly drifting into becoming a niche market technology. But now, Flash CS3 (and the Flash player 9) puts Flash back into the game as an important player. &#8230; This means that it now makes more sense for web developers to learn Flash technology. I go over &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[47,106],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}