BIT-101 [2003-2017]

A few people have asked about putting my FF08 presentation slides on line. Unfortunately (or fortunately actually), I don’t make slides with tons of info on them. No long lists of bullet points or text. Just some visual cues to give the audience something to look at and to help pace myself and know what to say next.

However, people seemed to like the presentation, so I thought maybe I’d cover some of the basic ideas in writing.

Basically, I started Flash in 1999. Over the next couple years I started learning about ActionScript and in 2001 started this website, bit-101.com. Contributed to some books, did a fair amount of side work, and started becoming this somewhat well known Flash guy. But my day job was assistant (to the) estimator in the HVAC department of a large mechanical contracting company in Boston. Hated it. I’d work there all day, then go home and do Flash.

So in 2003, I got nominated for a Flash Forward Film Festival award in the Experimental Category. I went down to NYC and wound up winning! Pretty cool. I was pretty pumped up. I had recognition as a Flash dude. Ready for the big time. I went back to Boston and back to my job the next Monday. I’d like to say I walked into my boss’s office and quit, but what happened is that he called me into his office and fired me.

So on one level I was pretty bummed out about being fired, but underneath that I was pretty psyched because I could do Flash full time, which I started doing a few days later and am still doing.

So the theme of Flash Forward 2008 was “Passion” and I think that a lot of people in the Flash community have a whole lot of that. More than in a lot of similar fields. I don’t know, but I kind of doubt the PHP community has the same passion that Flash has. (Maybe they do, but that line got a good laugh from the audience anyway. 🙂 ) I think part of that is that traditionally, most people who work in Flash have started out as more creative people. Even Flash developers often started out on more of the design side of things and learned programming via ActionScript (that’s definitely my story). Of course a lot of that is changing with Flex pulling in traditional Java developers and people from other fields. But overall, Flashers have this creative streak thrown in with this geeky developer aspect, which is probably why Flash conferences are so much fun.

At this point I took a look a the definition of “Flash”, wondering why did they name the product what they did? Why not “Web Animation Tool” or “Internet Application Builder”?

Flash(y): ostentatiously attractive or impressive

Cool. That pretty much describes Flash, historically. There’s that “WOW” factor. That thing that makes you look twice and then forward the link to your friends. Then I went a step further and looked up “ostentatious”:

Ostentatious: characterized by vulgar or pretentious display; designed to impress or attract notice

Yeah! Now that’s why I got into Flash! Now that whole vulgar and pretentious part can be taken negatively, but I kind of like it. It’s in your face. It’s getting your attention. You can’t ignore it. It’s cool! This was all very prevelant in my early years in Flash: 1999-2002. So I made a video to give people who might not have been into it back then, an idea of what it was like:

The Dark Years

Like all good stories, you need a villain. Ours was this man:

Jakob Nielsen. Actually, he’s not a bad guy. He just made this statement in an article, “Flash: 99% Bad” and had his 15 minutes of fame with it:

Although multimedia has its role on the Web, current Flash technology tends to discourage usability for three reasons: it makes bad design more likely, it breaks with the Web’s fundamental interaction style, and it consumes resources that would be better spent enhancing a site’s core value. – Jakob Nielsen

But so what? Take a look at his site: https://www.useit.com/. This is not a man who really sees the aesthetic value of nice design. Big deal, no wonder he doesn’t like Flash. The problem wasn’t that he said that. The problem is that we listened.

In June of 2002, Macromedia announced a partnership with Jakob Nielsen, to improve the usability of Internet applications in the next version of Flash. Take a look at his photo and his site. This is the man who is going to help us make Flash “better”. Right.

But, in 2003, Macromedia released Flash MX 2004. This had a bunch of new features, including:

• New User Interface components for building Rich Internet Applications.
• New ActionScript 2.0 for building complex applications.
• New “screens and forms” for building Rich Internet applications

Screens and forms never really took off, but the whole concept at the time was to lure developers from other communities in to become Flash Rich Internet Application Developers. The problem was that developers would come into Flash, see a timeline with layers and drawing tools and run away screaming. Screens and forms were an attempt to make a better application development environment.

So although that didn’t work, Macromedia forged ahead and created Flex. Flex is aimed from the bottom up at creating RIAs. It’s built (since Flex 2) on Eclipse, a well known, popular development environment. It has a rich set of components, layout containers, etc. for creating applications.

Now if you take a look at most Flex sites today, you see very polished, professional applicatons. Lots of UI controls, charts, graphs, numbers, things layed out in grids, nice transitons, rounded corners, smooth gradients, that shade of blue that makes you want to scream because the developer was too lazy to change it, etc.

All well and good, but THAT’s not why I got into Flash! When I saw my first over-the-top Flash site, or made my first tween, my thought wasn’t “Oh my God! Someday I’ll be able to bind a data grid to an online database and display the results in a chart!!!”

Why Flex is good for Flash

If you look at the design / creative / expressive features that were in Flash 4, and then look across the versions of Flash up to Flash MX 2004 (Flash 7), you’ll see that virtually nothing changed. You’ve got the same old drawing tools, the same color picker, same timeline (give or take). Almost all the changes over that 5-6 year period were squarely aimed at adding new development / programming / application building features. (We did get the drawing API in 7, but that’s still more of a code-based feature.) Designers and creative people got left in the dust. People like me who got into the programming side of it still had plenty to play with, but a lot of people got left behind.

But Flex is now there to siphon off that development aspect, leaving Flash itself to move back to its roots as a creative tool. You did start to see that in the first version of Flash to be released after Flex: Flash 8. We got BitmapData – pixel level control of bitmaps, bitmap filters – dropshadows, blurs, bevels, glows, etc., blend modes. It was really the first batch of new expressive features to enter Flash in many years.

With Flash CS3, things stalled a bit, I think due to the fact that Adobe had to cram AS3 into the Flash authoring tool – no small feat. That took all their engineering cycles, so not much in terms of new creative tools there.

But Flash 10… OMFG. They’ve almost made up for the years of silence in one release. Just look at the new creative features about to be dropped on us: New Motion Editor / Tween Engine, 3D!!!, Bones (inverse kinematics), new Drawing API, Pixel Bender, new Text Engine, and Dynamic Sound Creation.

More than enough tools to make Jakob Nielsen very, very nervous.

My closing words of wisdom: Get out there and be OSTENTATIOUS.