Flash pros ponder the future, discuss creativity, and share tips

by Jenny Carless

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Flash, developers and designers discuss creativity, offer tips, and envision Flash ten years down the road.

Jonathan Gay, creator of Flash, says that the colored plastic LEGO blocks of his childhood helped teach him the basics of engineering design. They helped him express his passion for building things and were the foundation for his own style of design and development, which served in the creation of Flash.

It's no surprise, then, that today's developers and designers use similar images in describing their affinity for Flash.

"Using Flash feels almost like carpentry," says Colin Moock, author of the world-renowned guide to Flash programming, ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide. "You build up these little widgets like a mad scientist or inventor who's carving little robots out of wood. It has this very hands-on, physical builder's appeal to it," which proved to be a good thing for Moock, who admits he's never been much of a mathematician. 

"When I program, I depend on building logical systems more than raw mathematical skill," he continues. "Flash is a builder's world that I understand, so it helps me express ideas on a computer that I might not be able to produce otherwise."

Flash and creativity

Whatever your image, Flash helps developers and designers alike express creativity. It inspires people to go beyond their traditional comfort zone, whether that's programming or design.

Rafiq Elmansy, principal at Bee Design Studio and founder of the first Macromedia User Group in Egypt, puts it this way: "Any creative idea needs a tool to get it out into the real world. Flash is a tool that enables me to free my ideas."

Matt Voerman feels the same way. "The versatility of Flash...to work with just about any media format…means that the bottleneck to delivering creative experiences is no longer the tool but my mind," says the Australian author, Adobe Community Expert, and longtime Flash platform evangelist. "This is one of the truly amazing things about Flash. You're really only restricted…by your imagination."

Working in Flash has also helped developers and designers hone their skills.

"Flash has helped me develop my ideas quickly and easily," explains Shin Matsumura, manager of the Flash OOP User Group in Japan. "I bring my various types of audio and visual content into Flash and build something quickly that mirrors my ideas."

"I’ve been developing multimedia for more than a decade now, and as I think back, I see a lot of my growth as a developer coming from my Flash work," adds Dan Carr, who has created a range of features for Flash, including e-learning templates and UI components for Flash MX Professional 2004. "I think the greatest thing it has done for me is to connect my design sense with my programming ability."

Flash tips and tricks

We asked designers and developers with many years' experience using Flash to share some of their tips and tricks. As you'd expect, their advice ranges from general to specific — and is sometimes unusual.

General advice

A tip for beginners

Colin Moock says, "Don't get overly stressed about whether the code is clean — or whether you're doing it the best possible way or the most efficient way. If you can get something going, and it's doing what you want it to do, then it's good — it's done."

Pick a hat...

"Pick the hat you want to wear. Flash allows you to wear at least three: the designer, the animator, or the programmer," counsels Morena Carvalho, lead consultant and designer for MocaLoca, based in Sydney, Australia. "I've always been a lousy programmer, so I decided to try the designer path. Look for a partner…who wears the other hat…. The great news is you can always try a different hat anytime."

Specialize

"As Flash becomes larger and larger and the industry becomes more mature and more segmented, my main piece of advice is to begin by focusing on one area," notes R Blank, of Almer/Blank, a Flash Solutions Alliance Partner based in Venice, California. "Become known for something in particular, rather than trying to market your services as a master of the tool in general."

Specific tips

Wait a frame

Andreas Heim and Darron Schall both offer the same advice: "I'm not sure who coined the phrase, 'When in doubt, wait a frame,' but for as long as I've been programming in Flash, it still often proves to be the solution to an inexplicable problem," says Heim, who is director of technology at Smashing Ideas in Seattle.

"If waiting a frame doesn't work, try waiting two frames," adds Schall, an independent consultant. "Seriously, the key to building things in Flash — especially when using any sort of user interface components — is just to wait a frame if something doesn't work quite right."

Learn object-oriented programming

"Learn object-oriented programming, even if you're a casual coder," suggests Grant Skinner, CEO and chief architect of gskinner.com in Edmonton, Alberta. "Flash makes so much more sense once you get it, and it saves you a ton of time in the long run."

Include an audio channel

Robert Reinhardt of Schematic offers a cautionary tale for Flash Video encoding: Always include an audio channel. "The frame rate of your Flash Video will be more accurate and exact if you have an audio track — even a silent one — accompanying the video track," explains the author of books such as Flash Bible and Flash ActionScript Bible. "We noticed a problem on a project where large frame sizes with high-definition (HD) video where dropping frames continuously — as low as 12fps…. But when we added an audio track, the frame rate instantly came back to 30fps." 

Limit the nodes

"For mobile devices, graphics should have as few nodes as possible," says Mariam Dholkawala, who heads a studio at Indiagames Ltd. "Because screen sizes are small, graphics don't need to be perfectly shaped. In fact, they sometimes look blurred. Instead, you can use straight and angled lines to produce good, sharp output on mobile displays." 

And finally...

"If you wish the magnifying glass could zoom in just one more level, you are a control freak," says Justin Everett-Church, senior product manager, Designer/Developer Relations for Flash at Adobe. "Flash has saved me on more than one occasion from editing part of a graphic that works out to be about a tenth of a pixel wide."

"I tend to refer to myself and other developers as 'Flashers'," explains Canada's Stacey Mulcahy. "Trust me, there are two people you don’t use that term with: one is your mother, and the other is a customs officer."

The sky's the limit

Designers and developers conjure up many images of Flash in ten years — from envisioning specific new enhancements to predicting the ubiquity of Flash in all aspects of our daily lives. Whatever their specific images might be, they enthusiastically predict continued success.

It was expressed in many different ways, but Darron Schall best sums up what many have said: "The amount of change that Flash has gone through over the past ten years leads me to believe that the sky's the limit over the next ten."

In many observers' eyes, the combination of Macromedia and Adobe is an important reason that future is so bright.

"In my experience using Flash for six years under the Macromedia flagship, I have seen it evolve from a simple, lightweight web animation tool to a rich application development tool," says Mariam Dholkawala. "Now with Adobe's strategies of redefining software and technologies and setting new standards for delivering content, I can see Flash reaching a new peak with every version release."

What will you be creating with those future releases?

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