Flash, ahhhh!

[AndyThomas]

Over the last couple of days I attended a very interesting Macromedia seminar, all about Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash etc.  I was very impressed by the small file sizes Flash produces and the general cohesion of all the products.  What was also interesting was that I recognised elements from several different programs I was familiar with all bundled in - it was like some strange hybrid of Hypercard, PowerPoint, Imagine (3D prog) and of course any HTML editor you care to mention.I've also identified a potential reason for some people not being able to view Simon's Moonfruit sites.  As you may know, Moonfruit is 100% Flash.  Now, if people have the appropriate plugin that's fine and it'll work.  As Flash is bundled with modern browsers it's near saturation point.BUT, and this is the kicker, some corporations/local authorities aren't running modern browsers.  Now, in theory the older browsers should be able to download the plugin.  Right?  Wrong.  Because some corp/authorities' firewalls won't let you download the plugin.  So if someone with one of these "time frozen" systems, if you like, tries to access a Moonfruit site they'll hit a dead end.  I would think most home users will be fine, but it might prevent a few people from accessing the pages from work.I can definitely see Flash becoming very dominant in the not-too-distant future.  One nice piece of irony - government web sites aren't allowed to incorporate Flash for accessibility reasons; but the Labour web site uses Flash.  I'm sure you're not surprised!