Thursday, November 17th, 2005
What I want from Flash.Next
<p>Jonathan Boutelle has written Flash: what is it good for?, and many people have options on Ajax, Flash, Ajax with Flash, and more.There are a few things that I would love to see improved in Flash, to make me like it more:
- Integrate with my browsers saved fields. When I go to a site that needs my email address, I hit the first key and my browser auto fills for me. If I am in Flash field this doesn’t happen.
- Integrate events with browser history
- Make it so by default you can copy and paste text. Some apps allow you, others don’t.
- Printing: I printed out a map that was displayed via Flash, and got a blank page. This was from Macromedia’s site :)
- Mac performance: the performance on my Mac is terrible in comparison to my PC. I hope that 8.5 helps there (they claim it does)
They have gone a lot of good things recently such as:
- Adding View Source support
- Making an IDE that doesn’t shove a timeline in a developers face
- Improving the VM immensely (JIT)
- Adding the Flash/JavaScript bridge
Is there anything else that you would like to see in the next version of Flash?
3.1 rating from 8 votes
If you want to see some posible future direction that Macromedia is headed for developers, check out the Flex 2 alpha. Not exactly Flash, but it does have an AJAX-ish feel with the XML integration. Of course there is a 15 minute demo video to check out if you with. http://labs.macromedia.com/
(repeated from an earlier thread)
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Will there ever be a version of flash that creates flash applets as first class DOM nodes? (I realise this would probably require extensive browser integration).
I *really* want to be able to use a flash applet as I would any other HTMLElement, eg: layering, clipping, z-index, opacity, non-pixel value dimensions, *CSS SUPPORT*, natural auto resizing, ability to support full range of W3C DOM events, sitting in its own xml namespace.
If I had *all* of that, then I could consider flash ready for integration into nice DHTML+AJAX applications.
It would also be super if you could use it nicely with XBL.
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Doesn’t anyone else find these things important?
To further expound:
It’s as if the Flash folks keep noticing that web-browser tech is catching up to Flash… so they make a quick fix and say, “but looook! flash can do all of that in one package, and it can also do X and Y…. why would you use anything else?”
The problem is that people WANT to use a browser, NOT the flash platform. It is simply stupid to replicate a browser platform inside the flash applet (MM is almost there :p).
They need to concentrate MUCH more on integration into real browsers (work with vendors, not against), and to participate in standards development (not to “embrace and extend”).
I really hope that Adobe cut out the “not invented here” mantra/rubbish that Macromedia has lived by thus-far, to really open up the possibilities of web-as-platform.