For some other news in my corner of the web: Macromedia re-launched their web site.
While I think the color choices are very nice, and the overall layout is very sexy (hmm… large striking photo with text scrolling over it… menubar at top… 3 column utility at bottom… hmm… eConvergent?), like many others have pointed out, though it’s very sexy, just how functional is it?
Nesting the entire content in one big flash file is neat (after all, they should eat their own dog food) but there are so many problems that go along with it. Maybe it’s still some of the residual “all-flash-website-phobia” that PaigeWarner put in me, who knows. As positive as I would like to be for them, I just have a nagging “tsk-tsk-tsk” in my head when I think about it.
Plug-in worries.
Browser version with plug-in worries.
SWF file size worries.
Text indexing worries.
Section 508 compliance worries.
Sure there are fixes for most of these things with in the latest versions of the flash plug-in… but will people actually take the time to upgrade? I still have some friends that are running Netscape 4.x Mac with the flash 4 plug-in.
There’s also the fact that everything is non-standard in the UI: Scrollbars, pulldown menus, everything. The whole damned wheel, re-invented. As a designer, I can’t help but think “ooh! cool! I can have fun with this…”, but as a developer, it bothers me. There’s too much room for error when you’re completely re-coding these kinds of low level functions. Not to mention the fact that all the code for these UI controls are loading and playing back at runtime, and have a noticeable speed decrease from the native Windows and Mac OS widgets. And if nothing else, it’s expecting users to understand yet another non-standard metaphor in the web UI experience.
The other problem I have with an all flash site, is the noticeable lag that occurs when using “less than peppy” machines. Loading the new macromedia.com site up in the Safari browser on my aging G4, for example, makes the site completely unusable due to flash’s obscenely slow playback speed in Mac OS X. This is not good…
I like macromedia as a company. I think they’re really smart. Maybe they’re thinking “outside the box” and I’m just having trouble dealing with it. Who knows.