Get Flash?
Mima: Get Flash
Here’s a hypothesis: 95% of the people who see your Non-Flash homepage are doing so because they are viewing it on a device that doesn’t support Flash.
As a user who does a significant amount of web browsing via mobile device (either iPhone or DSi), when I encounter a “Get Flash” page I feel as though the site’s designers are telling me 1 of 3 things:
- We considered your needs, but were unable to act upon them.
- We considered your needs, but chose not to act upon them.
- We didn’t consider your needs.
Regardless of the reason, it certainly does make one feel unloved.
P.S. No offense to MIMA, but I did really want to check on upcoming events this morning at the coffee shop…
posted by Dakota Brown on May 15th, 2009 at 7:50 am Permanent link to this post
2 Responses to “Get Flash?”
Funny, my initial response would be one of these three things:
1. Stupid phone
2. Stupid Apple
3. Stupid Adobe
I’ve learned that the latter is the correct emotional response. The reason there is no Flash Player for mobile devices is because Adobe hasn’t completed Flash Lite – the mobile cousin of their desktop based Flash Player.
I realize your point isn’t about Flash not being available on your iPhone, but rather why web designers don’t give a crap about mobile users. After all, there are roughly 1.2 billion people surfing the web through iPhones, Sidekicks, and Blackberry’s.
Three years ago, it was not a question – every Flash site needed a non-Flash page that had good text for SEO, and a link to download Flash. That made sense then. Web designers slaved over creating these fabulously flashy sites and their clients paid plenty, so of course we wanted everyone to tick here and “Get Flash to experience the full version of the site.”
Today, rather than think about creating a more robust non-Flash page for mobile users, we should be asking ourselves a more important question, much sooner: Should this site even be built using Flash? I seems today that Flash is not used out of necessity, but out of routine.
I think you should add a fourth point to your list: 4. The Website was built more than 2 years ago.
Oh, and if you have a second, check out how Flash is being used on the MIMA site. Completely unnecessary.
As far as Flash Lite goes, it is done. I did some significant prototyping with it on a Nokia N95 2+ years ago. It was an entirely annoying platform to work on, and my group threw it out the window and focused on Python for rapid prototyping and J2ME for more robust development.
As far as Flash being on a phone, I’d prefer it just wasn’t. The bottom line is that Flash just isn’t anywhere near a suitable format to allow it in to a mobile device’s runtime. There aren’t any good solutions for threading and/or garbage collection which in a poorly developed experience can even grind a topline desktop computer to a halt.
Even if mobile devices did allow Flash to run within their browsers, it will be even longer (likely never) before Flash is allowed to make API calls to devices functions (camera, GPS, sensors, etc.). Flash designers will get mad that they can’t make apps, and device/network proprietors will simply say there’s an SDK for that.
When Flash support was announced, and delivered, for the Wii browser every Flash site out there rejoiced in the fact that every Flash designer/developer was now a Wii designer/developer. Well a lot of games were produced, but none of them were very good. There were some formal grumblings made to Nintendo about enhanced Flash support, and the response was if you want to make games, there’s already an SDK for that (Wiiware).
I agree that Flash has its appropriate applications, but the writing on the wall is that list of appropriate applications isn’t expanding anywhere as rapidly as the space which we might design experiences for.