Skip Intro back with a different Face?

Blame it on Skip Intro for the Flash 99% Bad name. But honestly, I feel that history is being repeated here. If you look around, you will see bold experiments, wild prototypes done in ActionScript 3.0 and post Flash Player 8, which were not doable in Flash before. I am not trying to point fingers are anybody, nobody at all and the remaining part of this article is purely my presonal speculation.

We’re going on another wild ride with the capabilities of ActionScript, the more powerful it gets, the more crazy and cool things we can do with it. Mimic applications in ActionScript that had already been there with other technologies and in place, just because we can do that in ActionScript is not the really the way I would envision the usage of Flash. According to my opinion, we should remember what happen to Flash when everybody started doing Intros. Aren’t we simulating a similar situation but this time with ActionScript. I would rather stick to doing what is needed for an Application and the reason it should be done in Flash/ActionScript.

For instance, I love Flash powered Blogs but why? Why should you have your blog running on a Flash Player? Is it just me, I am not sure! Another is to use Flash just for the Navigation of a site just because you can have that ting sound and the swiveling mouseover.

Once we were discussing about doing some experiments with the new Flash Player 8 capabilities. Well of course, one of the top topic that came up was the Enhanced Bitmap Manipulation Capabilities. Ok, do we really need to do that? Where are we using that? Should we do a “Hello World” sample? Finally, we decided against just doing a “Hello World” kinda sample but wait on untill we found something that it really fits its usage. We did found the usage including transitions, etc in the right place. Another idea was when to user @ExternalInterface@. We never found a good Use Case Scenario other than a “Hello World”. We simply have to shelved the idea till we come up with something that serves its real purpose.

Here again, I am not advocating against doing experiments, prototypes. Let us just try to keep Skip Intro in the back of our mind and let us prevent that from repeating in another form which may even be uglier. Personally, I know I am bit of the Purist and a Perfectionist but I am sorry I cannot help it.