Few days ago, during the community day, I introduced myself to a new colleague, of a very different department. Since my main focus at the present in Conchango is Flash/Flex development, I declared to him so. He then asked me “so are you the one that makes heavy web pages long to load?”. It should have been a funny joke, probably, but considering that is almost a decade that I put lot of effort on optimizing applets and that I try to take the best from any extra Kilobyte, I didn’t find it that funny.
Of course his opinion was because Flash in the past gained the association to annoying intros, so I can’t really blame him, but I just thought those times were far now, but of course for me the time might run faster than for others. Anyway, I was quite unprepared and I think I have answered something like “well, actually it’s a while that I don’t do Flash websites and I’m instead focused more on applications or progressive enhancement for small components”, that is absolutely true, but I still think I should have answered differently.
One other possible answer could have been “it’s not my fault if the client wants big 3d carousels or videos in the homepage”. But probably a better and more complete answer would have been “Flash compresses code and can use vector graphics, which maths gets further optimized; so if you are clever enough you can do pretty amazing stuff with very, VERY, few Kilobytes”.
Is not a case that in the famous 5k competition (awarding the best website or page in just 5 Kilobytes), a web version of the demo ones, the most amazing stuff I saw was done in Flash. Another incredible, and very recent, example, which uses the latest Flash Player features, and still staying within the 5k limit, is “Cut by the wind” by Grant Skinner. Isn’t it impressive with its random hair movements and clouds generation? With other few kilobytes I presume it would have been possible to generate also the sound track.
Next time someone will ask me a similar question, hopefully, I will be more prepared ;)