I went and checked out the Seattle Flash User Group yesterday and I came away realizing a couple of things. One is that the people who use Flash are an incredibly diverse group. The speaker for the meeting was Kev Brockschmidt who is a great artist and showed off some of his Flash examples. The other is that Flash has a long way to go as a development platform. So many of the people at the meeting think of Flash only in terms of animation, which is fine, but I think it’s a misconception that many people have.
Flash has always been about experience. Whether it’s playing a Flash game, interacting with a game website in Flash, or watching a video done in Flash, the idea is always to make the experience engaging and fun. Eventually awesome developers will transfer that fun, engaging experience to the robust applications they develop for the web. I hope that all of the Flash animators out there give Flex 2 a try and just see what it can do.
Rich Internet Applications are going to change usability on the web and there will be a fine line between a good user experience and an annoying one, but I think we’ll see more of the former. The Flash community has so many talented, design-driven people that once the hardcore developers catch on, the meshing of ideas is going to force people to rethink how they build web apps. There are going to be some growing pains, but in the end we’ll have a better, more collaborative web in which engaging the user is easy. Advertisers should be very happy.
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