For years I’ve had an unbridled disgust for Macromedia’s Flash (now Adobe’s) program. It turned up in horrible places on websites, primarily music band sites, annoying background music and adverts. It’s most useful purpose seemed to be for time wasting mini games which wasn’t exactly useful. Any text in a flash website was usually inaccessible to screen readers and low bandwidth users and worse, you couldn’t copy the text.
This whole attitude was at odds to the rest of Macromedia’s products in the internet suite, because I absolutely loved using Dreamweaver and Fireworks. But now Flash has emerged from my hate club with flying colours thanks to the wonderful website Youtube. What flash has provided to youtube is a completely stable and foolproof method of displaying short video clips to thousands of users. I’m actually at the point where I’m dissapointed if I get directed to a video that isn’t hosted on youtube.
Congrats to Flash for finally finding the use it was destined to excel at.
Interesting perspective – I think u may be confusing speed with good. I recall reading recently the controversy of the choice to use on2 vp6 video tech, fluaunting the new “H” video standards. I too think youtube rocks, but i am convinced it has nothing to do with flash, or their choice of video codec. i really must dig out that article that explored why they chose on2’s old codec, it was a good read. I think other video sites should tune their player configs, and throw some bandwith at their sites so that they too can lauch video as fast as youtube.
I wasn’t a big fan of Flash either because it always seemed to be used for flashing ads that annoyed the crap out of you, but there are a few devices coming out that support flash (like the Chumby, and I think the iRiver?) which could be a great for cross platform gaming on portable devices.
And don’t forget Linerider http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/26674594/