I think flash does not has it’s place out there. The reason we think there is, is that it is implemented at many pages.

I am cool with Click to Flash in Safari!

Great post, though I thoroughly disagree. Flash and Silverlight (which was created just to be a thorn on Flash’s side) are fundamentally against the nature of the web.

The Web is a platform for content delivery and semantic structure. The web is not and has never, ever been envisioned as presentation layer.

Flash intimately binds the presentation layer with the web. And this dead wrong. Yes, it is convenient, yes it has grown within the industry but that is only because it grew out of its niche. Which was simple animations.

The answer is not to back down from HTML5. Nor is it to make Flash run leaner.

The answer is to pursue the correct path and stick with standards and what the web is all about.

Worse still, people hail these Flash-free websites as progress and the road to the future. With terrible performance and compatibility like that, I prefer Flash”

With 8 cores, you’re saying that your load average was 5.6 or so while browsing Macheist?
Or do you mean your load average was 0.70 when browsing Macheist? Mine jumped to 0.70 when browsing Macheist too. But that’s not 70 percent of your processing power, that’s a time-sliced 70 percent of one core.

When browsing the 2K Games site (Flash), my load average jumps to 85 percent. When watching Flash video, it again jumps to 105 percent. This says to me that Flash has worse performance than HTML/CSS. And the latter can improve – it’s still early days.

The point being that Macheist looks like Flash. It uses less CPU (and therefore battery) than Flash. It’s HTML/CSS so it works on iPhone (and therefore iPad). It’s HTML and therefore it’s going to much more likely that it’s accessible to screen readers and text-to-speech – Flash tends to be a big lump of inaccessible image-text which is unusable for many accessibility purposes. So, by my book, that makes HTML/CSS much more ‘compatible’ than Flash.

I’m not saying we should ban Flash but like many things, there is a good time to use it and a bad time to use it. The 2K Games web site, with Click2Flash installed, shows why it’s bad. The entire web site is a Flash image-object and there’s no fallback for more accessible content.

I teach occasional private Flash classes at air force bases and they are doing some pretty amazing Flash work. Taking jet engine schematics and animating coolant and electrical systems not to mention stuff as crazy as training necessary “flag signals” to successfully land a helicopter. For the record, I’ve never wanted Flash on my iPhone.

Captivate is a love/hate piece of software for me personally but thousands use it internally to create interactive screencasts for elearning. As a huge Apple fan, I also personally love the simplicity and elegance of ScreenFlow on my mac but there is something to be said for the interactivity of the Captivate generated Flash movies with quizzes that are SCORM compliant that hook into any standard LMS for tracking. As always, you use what’s appropriate for the project.

I found your blog about 6 months ago and was extremely impressed. I think I can learn a lot from you. I will sign up for icon resource very soon as I can learn just fine from watching movies and working with project files! Amazon’s cashing in also as I load up on UI, Interface and design books. I’ve only ever wanted to be a better instructor to my students and help them create content that your readers would not resent.

The Flash hate on your site was something I tried to look beyond and still bookmarked your site. The fact that you went to the effort to live a Flashless February, post conclusions and a revised perspective illustrates the sincerity of your site. Thanks.