The college I went to does an annual school trip to web design and development businesses for first year students. It’s to show them what the industry is really like and the differences between the firms that are out here. This is the second time they’ve come to my work while I’ve been employed there and I try to use the hour to give them as much advice as I can. I’ve stayed friends with a couple of my teachers and one had been telling me about a new teacher that was telling the students that Flash was dead. Now, half the course is design and the other half is programming and Flash takes up a large part of that. So I took the opportunity to, not continue the whole HTML5 vs Flash debate, but to tell the students not to ignore any technology. Why? Not because Flash is always the best thing or HTML5 isn’t going to shake things up but because the vast majority of Internet users don’t care what you made that site or game in. They only care that it works.
Since Steve Jobs called for the death of Flash, which is all about keeping money coming through the app store, there’s been huge debate about the future of the web and it’s not slowing down. Blogs like The Flash Blog are putting up posts without comments because the debate can get so heated it can turn personal. But when I try to talk to the people around me about it, very few understand what I’m talking about and even less care. And that’s the thing we all need to remember. As web designers or developers, we are, for the most part, early adopters. And a large amount of those are Mac users. There’s billions of computer users in the world and they run Windows, do you think they care how a Youtube video runs on somebody’s MacBook Pro? Most don’t really understand what Flash is, they just know once they download that thing that the computer tells them to, the video they want to watch or the game they want to play works now.
So what am I saying here? I’m not saying Apple users don’t matter, I do have an iPhone. I’m just saying that there are still things that only Flash can do. I’ve yet to see an HTML5/CSS/JS site that has the interactivity of some of the amazing sites featured on thefwa.com, sites that take 25 people and months to make. My work is currently pitching a site to a client that has to be made in Flash, it’s going to have a real person that interacts with certain button clicks and the background is going to have video running constantly. The fact is, the client wants a certain kind of site and the technology that we use doesn’t matter to them as long as it’s able to reach the most amount of people as possible. And if that means they get the site they want, then they’ll gladly sacrifice those people that block Flash or those that won’t visit the site because their computer’s CPU runs at 100%.
Somewhere in there I have a point. It’s don’t stop uses a technology because someone you look up to tells you not to. Use the best one for the job you need to do. I would say at least 75% and maybe even more don’t care what you made it in. Look how long it’s taken us to make people understand there’s more than one Internet browser. Try talking to your sister about something called Flash, it’s like trying to explain something from Final Fantasy to her. I read today that 73 million people play Farmville, do you think they care about anything other than that their games work in Facebook?