Flash: Building the Interactive Web

This book gives me a Flash-back. I discovered Flash around 2008 and spent endless amount of time and energy learning all types of animated techniques. I also wasted a tremendous amount of time sitting and waiting for each Flash site to load over my dialup connection. Those were the days. Like many designers, Flash lost me when it became a complex programing language. I shifted my focus on web standards, but I could never imagine Flash would be dead so soon.

Seeing a book writing about the history of Flash, I couldn’t help picking it up. I am a bit disappointed that Anastasia Salter and John Murray focus mostly on Flash games. They didn’t mention early groundbreaking sites like Balthaser, Eye4U, and Once Upon a Forest or new masters of Flash like Joshua Davis, Yugo Nakamura, and Eric Jordan (just to name a few).

Flash under Macromedia was thriving. The community was strong, passionate, and sharing. If Adobe didn’t acquire Macromedia, I wonderful if Flash would have fallen as fast as it has under Adobe. If Adobe got into the browser game like Google, would it able to save Flash? In any rate, Flash definitely had its moment. As the book suggested, Flash’s influence and legacy will live on and I would love to see Flash resurrected, but the future of Flash is not too bright at all.