I Hate Flash

One of my fun weekly tasks with Alliance Wakeskate is to update our Myspace profile with the Monday Cover of the week. It’s basically the only time I go on Myspace anymore because it is so yesterday in the world of (anti)social networking. They obviously know that and are attempting to combat it with tons of new features. Which brings me to my point.

Today when I signed on to upload the photo, I found a completely new flash-based photo upload system showing all the random crap on my desktop. Guess what. It didn’t work. I had to go back to the old upload system, still flash based, but a little less fancy. Just another piece of straw on the camel’s back of why I hate flash.

I have the same problem with wordpress. Never fails when I try to use the flash-based image uploader, it gives me an error message and I have to try again with the browser uploader. This system works every time. Why they don’t just have you use the browser uploader in the first place is a mystery to me. I think it’s all part of flash designers master plan to stay employed.

My friend Dave Lehl just relaunched his photography website and wrote asking me to link to YoBeat. I agreed and then went to the site and found a flash site. After a few minutes of trying to select images, I gave up and told Dave to just send me a few of his favorites. I explained I found his site frustrating to navigate, which he obviously disagreed with. But aside from the slow load time, the incompatibility with search engines and iphones and its difficulty to alter, my real problem with flash is just this. Flash sites generally are built to be navigated one way. And while this navigation may be intuitive to the people who design and build them, not everyone uses the internet the same way. So while the site seems super easy to navigate to one person, it’s a clusterfuck to another.

Of course flash designers will disagree, but they are trying to stay employed so I can’t really blame them. But this is my opinion and I am not the only one who feels this way…In fact I feel like boardistan really said it best.