Category Archives: design

Flash on the Beach, Miami (CANCELED)

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UPDATE: The Miami conference has been canceled due to lack of attendees. This is very sad news, but in an economy like this it’s not really surprising. Guess we’ll just have to wait for September for our dose of Flash on the Beach.

If you are still looking for a Flash/Design conference to attend this summer, I highly recommend Flashbelt.

The best European Flash conference is heading to the states this spring. Flash on the Beach has been happening in Brighton, UK for the last few years and is such a good time, I think everyone should go.

I’ll be heading down to Miami this year to talk about YouTube type things, so if you are curious about using YouTube for a project, or just interested in hearing some stories about a very high performance Flash application, you should come to my session :).

Flash on the Beach Miami

In case you are interested, there’s tons of pictures and writing about past FotB events all over the place. So check it out, and hopefully I’ll see you there.

Speaking at Flash on the Beach

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I’ve been invited back to speak at Flash on the Beach this year. I’ll be giving a talk about the YouTube player APIs and how you can use YouTube in your online projects.

Flash on the Beach is a fantastic conference in Brighton at the end of September, and it’s one of the best Flash and design conferences to check out.

Registration is now open, so if you’re looking for an excuse to head to the UK, this is it.

Also, next week is Google I/O (Flight of the Conchords are playing a show there!), which I believe still has a few tickets available, and just next month I’ll be heading off to Flashbelt in Minneapolis, so come say ‘Hi’ if you see me wandering around either of these events.

Redesigned

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It’s been nearly three and a half years since I starting writing about nerdy things on this blog, and during that whole time the design has stayed mostly the same. Today I’m launching a new design, mostly because I’ve been procrastinating about upgrading the WordPress version the blog runs on (it was still 1.2!). So since my old ‘theme’ wasn’t even compatible with the new version, I decided to update the look a bit. I started with a version of the theme ‘Hemingway’ (Or is it ‘Ninjamonkeys’? Whatever.) Anyway, here’s the new design, running on the shiny new version 2.5 of WordPress. I hope you like it, and if there’s any bugs I’ll hopefully be able to work them out over the coming weeks.

Flash vs. Ajax

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I’ve been hearing a lot of Flash vs. Ajax arguments lately, and unfortunately, they almost always start off in the wrong way.

It’s very common to hear people argue about Flash websites or RIAs vs. Ajax websites or RIAs, but this is always the wrong way to approach building any website. Would you have an argument with an architect about whether to build a house out of wood vs concrete? Of course not, they would use each material to build the parts of the house that the respective material is best for. Sometimes you might want to build a shack or barn out of all wood, sometimes you might want to build an all brick house, but many times you’ll want to use the best material for each section of the house. Build the foundation out of concrete, the walls and roof out of wood.

Websites and web applications should be treated the same way. Break things down to a component level and go from there. Use the right tool for each component. If you can do it well with HTML/Javascript, go for it. If it would work out better with Flash, then why waste time recreating something with Javascript that you could build 3 times faster with Flash? There are plenty of great examples of this today around the internet:

One of my favorite examples is Google Finance. They use HTML and Javascript for the stuff that is best suited for that, and then when they need to show a nice graph, they drop in a great interactive Flash graph and talk to it using Javascript as needed. The Flash controls the Javascript, and the Javascript can control the Flash as needed.

Another example is Flickr. They started out using Flash to display all of the images, including the image notes and the other toolbar options along with each image. While this might have been a good choice as the site started out, it was soon replaced by a more efficient HTML version of the toolbar and notes system that works just as well as the Flash version. They did end up keeping one small bit of Flash so users can rotate images and see a preview before they save it.

So the next time you start planning a website and you start thinking: “Hmm, Flash or Ajax?” Instead of looking at it from a site-wide perspective, try thinking about your site as a series of components, and then choose Flash or HTML/Javascript for each individual component instead.

Speaking at Flash on the Beach

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Flash on the Beach is a new Flash conference this December in Brighton Beach, UK. I’ll be heading out to give a SWFObject presentation. I’m really excited about this one – it’s got a bunch of great speakers lined up already and they are still adding more every day. This will be my first time speaking at a conference over seas*, so I’m super excited about that as well.

* The OFFF festival flew me out to barcelona in 2001 to show some Flash creatures, but I didn’t give a presentation, they were just hanging out in one of the side rooms.