my growing respect for Flash

Recently, the quality of the Flash mini-programs in some web pages has improved - dramatically.

The two things that annoyed me immensely about the use of Flash seem to have gone away:

1. Trying to do a website in Flash - guess what? You can't bookmark the pages.
2. Hangs and slowdowns caused by the Flash engine on some platforms.

Google and Blizzard have shown what cool things can be done with flash. Instead of trying to cram a web site into Flash - which it not a good idea, they craft a really nice component that is displayed in web pages.

Google does this with Google Maps, if the web browser does not have a suitable SVG renderer.

Blizzard has created very rich WoW Atlas and other handy things using Flash.

I have a little unease about how much power Flash gives programmers to bypass intentional, well thought-out restrictions of a web browser. This has caused some problems. I hope the creators of Flash are hyper-vigilant about this now.

In terms of what it can accomplish though, today I have seen that a person or team with good artistic and programming skills can produce amazing results. The evidence of this has appeared on the web during the past couple years.

I am won over that it is worth really delving into learning Flash development now.

I already know Javascript - so time to learn ActionScript programming!