To Flash, or not to Flash

These days it’s pretty difficult to view a website that doesn’t have animation flooding the screen. The visually appealing effects of animation on the monitor always seems to catch the attention. But where do you draw the line between good animation, not so good animation and downright distracting animation. I mean, you would want your website to be 100% viewable on any source right? Well this is where you may come into a little bit of trouble.

The most common tool for producing such animation is undoubtedly, Flash. The visual experience coupled with its cross browser compatibility make it hard to look past when designing your website, however it doesn’t come without its flaws.

Since Adobe, makers of Flash, and Apple, one of the world’s biggest manufacturer of smart devices, were not able to come to an agreement, Flash is not viewable on any of Apple’s devices. Herein lies the problem. The most popular animation tool for designers is not compatible with the iPad, the most popular hand-held device with which to surf the web. So where do you draw the line? Would you rather have a web design which features some of the best animations available or would you sacrifice the quality of animation to make sure it is viewable by the highest number of people?

Well I suppose the answer will be different for each Web Developer as the needs and client demographic for each company will be completely different, so you would need to weigh up the pro’s and the con’s of your particular product and make a decision on which way you would like to sway. The massive shift recently in Android products may help you make your decision a lighter one as we have recently seen Apple’s market strong hold diminish, however, there are still some 7 billion Apple products floating around in the market.

Whichever way you may choose to go, you can only hope that it will be the content of your web site that draws the attention from your viewer and not the flashiness of the animation.