I’m positively surprised by the TSR (Swiss TV) were I work as a freelance.
They really use the new possibility of Flash. Their website is mostly using some Flash 7 adds for broadcasting news and TV show. Nothing revolutionary will you think but it’s not all. One of the show about the new technologies use some Flash 8 adds in some good manners. For example the visitor can let a message taken with their webcam and some of the nicer is then showed on TV.
The new Flash Lite 2, already open a lot of possibilities to broadcast on mobile phone. Unfortunately the mobile sphere is to young now (hard to update the plugin on mobile phone)
The “big fight” in Europe TV Media (and I guess all TV Media), is the TV on demand. Now that the situation is getting better in term of download speed most of the medias are preparing for this. And I guess that Flash will have a central position. Why?
Flash is cross platform. Flash is the easier system (I guess) that can control video (cue points).
I have read around recently about Flash Lite business cards, so I thought i would post mine.
It was done with Flash Lite 1.1.
It’s simple dynamic textfield loading the data from a txt file online.
So if I have to change my phone number, my address or anything else it will directly be updated the next time you open it.
I added some options :
- A button for calling
getURL("tel:555-1212"); - A button for opening the mail app
getURL("mailto://hello[AT]metah.ch"); - A button for sending me sms
getURL("sms:555-1212");
If you want to test it you can download it to your mobile.
Right click this link to download it (and Save As)
Incredible article I read today from The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, they managed to make a 3D image floating in the air. They didn’t mentioned anything about motion, but they said:
The emission time of the laser pulse light is on the order of a nano-second (10-9 sec). Our device uses 1 pulse for each dot to that the human eye can recognize plasma emission by utilizing the after-image effect, and enables a 100 dot/sec display.
I can’t wait to see it over my city ;)
Read the full article
According to Trenton Moss of Webcredible (http://www.webcredible.co.uk), there are seven reasons to make your website accessible :
- Your website will be easier to update
- Your website will be compatible with new browsing technologies
- Your website will appear higher in the search engines
- You will not have to incur legal fees
- The download time of your website will be significantly improved
- The usability of your website will be enhanced
- You will gain good publicity
Sure you can think what you want about those reasons, but in my point of view it’s nice to make your website accessible when knowing that
There are 8.6 million registered disabled people in the UK One in 12 men and one in 200 women have some form of colour blindness (nine percent of the UK population) Two million UK residents have a sight problem (four percent of the population) There are 12 million people aged 60 or over (21% of the UK population). At this age most people begin to experience a decrease in vision, hearing and physical and cognitive ability.
You can find the two articles about the “Benefits of making your website accessible”, part1 and part2
Citizens for Global Solutions is holding a contest for students, budding artists, multi-media designers, and activists who are interested in making some cool flash videos.[...]We’re looking for short flash movies that can inspire, amuse and activate people out there who believe a better world is possible.
You got until April 1, 2006 to make your submission. The theme this year is :
AMERICA’S ROLE IN THE WORLD: why do global problems matter to Americans and what do you think America should do about them?
A good way to tell the world what you think about the “Fight for Freedom” vision.
Flash Movie Contest 2006 Homepage
Watch the Winner of the contest 2005
Great idea that come from Italy, A&G Soluzioni Digitali has create a great application that show you from where come the sounds and also how strong it is (they use circle). This application is for video editing, so you can see what object makes sound (someone falling down) and how strong the sound are, directly on the movie.
This application can also be used for 3D and for games development.
Visit the See’n'Sound Website
By the way, their website is really unfriendly and old designed for a 1 year old website.
One more Top 10 Mistakes In Web Design, which include Flash. Here’s my personal answer about this topic.
The Mistakes #3 according: http://www.bootstrike.com
Flash, Director and Java Usage
Flash, Java is cool. Shockwave, cooler. Director, awesome! They are good, but it brings a host of disadvantages to a site using it -
* Can’t be indexed by search engines – Especially sites that are fully based on flash, search engines will have trouble indexing them with the exception of Google, but it still pays to have a non-flash section
This is the only point that I accept, and I think it’s the biggest (and only) problem of Flash.
I really hope that it will be solved soon.
* Big download == Long Wait – If you are using a flash movie as a splash image, do make sure you have a “Skip Introduction” outside the flash in HTML source, NOT in the movie itself, as it will bar users without flash from entering.
When was the last time you saw a Flash introduction? Maybe for games or movies websites and in this case it’s useful.
More, Flash give you more control over your loading (load the text first, then image, then video or any order you want).
Animation (Including Flash)
Animations serve to distract. That is why advertisement banners are animated (or even in Flash animation).
The first property of distraction is to take the attention of your webuser, and it’s exactly what I want, (i.e.: why my products are the best or what is the prize of a pizza).
For me the web is more multimedia than only a text media.
Here you can find some more critics about Flash :
My conclusion :
Sure Flash is a dangerous technology if you don’t use it well.
But some solution are well working :
- The use of html link on the Homepage give the spider (of search engine) access to all of your webpage.
- A webuser who don’t have the appropriate plugin version or have JavaScript deactivated can be nicely handled with the detection kit
- If banner distract it’s not because of Flash, the .gif, java as already shown the problem years ago.
It’s always a question of just middle. The problem doesn’t come from the technology but from the developers who forget they make website for user and not for them (when they don’t do it for them).
