Q: Let’s talk a bit about Flash technology.  How did you get into it?

Head: Oddly enough, I started at a place that did e-learning here in Toronto, and I thought Flash would be interesting to use for our work.  One day a third party company couldn’t get something done and asked us if we could figure it out for a project with Flash, and we did.  Ever since I’ve been a Flash person.

Q: Would you consider yourself more a designer than a developer?

Head: Definitely more of a designer, most of the things I’ve done up to now has been centered around graphic and web design.

Q: Compared to all the other possible technologies, why is it that you like Flash? What are the Pros and Cons?

Head: Flash is pretty nice since you can do whatever you want, play around and have fun with it.  It’s also nicely self-contained as one piece; you just work on it then add it wherever and don’t have to worry about browser stuff, which is nice.  Everything else you do, there’s always that question about browser compatibility, which isn’t always necessarily bad, but sometimes it is truly frustrating.

Q: Have you mostly been doing creative work, like advertising, or is it more enterprise level?

Head: Kind of neither, really.  Most of the places I’ve worked at aren’t really advertising companies, but I guess you could call them interactive studios.  They don’t exactly do their own branding work, but they do work on existing brands.  The place I work at currently often gets hired by advertising agencies that have a plan, but don’t know how to execute it.

Q: Have you ever touched Flex?

Head: I have used Flex Builder as an Actionscript editor, but never touched Flex itself.

Q: Have you had a chance to touch Flash CS5? What do you think?

Head: I have and I like it a lot.  When I first heard of it’s features at the time I thought ‘no big deal’, but then I started playing with it and thought the live movie preview on the timeline was really cool.  Since I work a lot with video, it’s saved me a lot of time.

Q: What are you thoughts on the whole iPad, HTML5, Apple closing down on the Flash platform?

Head: The whole thing is up for debate.  Do they really have to be fighting? Come on, seriously?  I really like the products from both.  It’s kind of crazy the amount of press it has gotten, even outside our industry; regular people are talking about it, even my parents ask me about it.  That’s nuts.  I mean, Apple can do what they want, its their platform, their app store and it’s kind of always been like that.  The only thing I don’t believe is that they’re doing it because they love web standards, I think it’s for their own self interest.  It sucks but its their call.

Q: Do you think it will have any repercussions on Adobe and their Flash product?

Head: I dunno.  I think there’s a lot of people that wanted to use the packager to adapt their Flash work to the iPhone, but I was always kind of curious as to what kind of content would end up there once everyone would have it.  There are a lot of Flash that could be made into an app, I know there are some up right now;  I haven’t seen them all, but the one’s I have looked pretty good.  But once everybody could just make an app with Flash, I’m sort of wondering what kind of quality there would be.  Hopefully there won’t be that much of an impact, I mean, it was one of the features that Adobe was pushing;  It’s disappointing, but there’s a lot of other features.

Q: And what about you as a designer,  are you going to learn HTML5 as well?

Head: I already plan to.  I know a lot of HTML/ CSS already and HTML5 is pretty cool especially with CSS3.  But I feel as a Flash developer, you should know that kind of stuff anyway.  If you’re going to build things for the web, this is the basic structure and if you’re want to have a good fallback for people that don’t have Flash player, as alternate content you can always use HTML5.

Q: For the future of the Flash Platform, what would you like to see?

Head: I would like to see better performance, and I’m hoping that when 10.1 comes out it will just be awesome.  But essentially I just want to see Flash do more amazing stuff, which is why we love it.  I hope that it continues to evolve and push the boundaries of what it can do.

This concerns me as a developer and I think it’s mostly because of the popularization and lack of education around the platform.  Performance is oft perceived as Flash’s Achilles Heel, but that’s hardly ever true, especially with Flash 10.1.  Flash is actually quite fast; faster than any benchmark for HTML5 or Javascript that I’ve seen as of yet.

There has been problems with Flash crashing browsers, having poor performance (especially on Mac) and general complaints of it.  There are a few reasons for those:

• Since Flash is a ‘prototype’ language (easy to create content), many Flash developers aren’t really developers and know nothing of optimizing code or even how the garbage collector works (think banner ads, horrible code).  The same thing occurred with PHP; since it was easy to learn, many non-developers tried their hand at it and a slew of poorly coded websites came up.
• Performance depends on OS and browser, but it is fairly slower on a Mac for the simple reason that Apple does not want Flash calling the low level system hooks.  This restriction makes it so that Apple can say ‘Flash sucks, HTML5 is the future!’.  If you want to be angry at someone, point your rage to Steve.
• Flash crashing the browser can be blamed to poor developers, the browser not handling plugins properly and Flash not stopping the bad code.  The latter will be fixed in 10.1; if the code is about to make the plugin crash, it will stop altogether.

Benchmarking is something that’s been popping up recently and I have to say that some of these numbers are fairly impressive.  For instance, Flash 10 used 22% of CPU when decoding video, and in 10.1 it will only use 6% because of GPU acceleration (Windows only for now).  You can bash Flash and Adobe all you want, but a performance increase of 72.7% is nothing to sneeze at.  I think it’s also the reason that Apple recently announced that it’s opening up its underlining decoding abilities.

In all this, let’s not forget why people use flash: Code once, runs everywhere.  I’m not saying that Flash is the be-all and end-all; Often times, Flash is used when simple Javascript or another method could of been used.  However, Flash does provide a way to deliver content uniformly across platforms and browsers, and as a developer, I strongly agree with this concept.