Mike Matas is a User Interface designer for Apple, and just recently put up his personal website that includes some examples of his work, as well as photos and videos from his life. It’s a very nice site, understated, and not really pushing too many boundaries for personal portfolio genre of websites – in a good way.
What is remarkable about the site itself is that all of the interactions and animations are handled with regular HTML, advanced CSS and Javascript, whereas a typical site of this type would normally utilise flash. Being an Apple employee, it’s likely that some of Steve Jobs’ obvious dislike of Flash is a contributing factor for Mike’s choice of technology here. But perhaps not.
Of late, there’s been a lot of talk about the death of flash, with the sorts of techniques on display in Mike’s site being it’s replacement. We take a more pragmatic approach here at Plant. It’s true that more and more Javascript and CSS can do the job that Flash used to do, and we’re eager to take those chances and push the limits of what is possible within the browser. But there’s plenty of other cases in which Flash is the right tool for the job. It’s all relative, and it’s pointless to try to come up with one blanket approach for everything, when it’s so obvious that there is a time and place for everything, including Flash for at least the foreseeable future.
One pretty big factor for us is practicality. It’s fine for Mike to develop his site in a way that runs fantastically in Apple’s browser Safari – because that’s his audience, but take a look at the site in Internet Explorer and you’ll quickly see what I’m talking about – which is, there’s nothing to see. In a practical sense, many of the techiques utilised by Mike here simply aren’t ready for wide spread use as they aren’t yet compatible, and for us, that’s a big enough reason in itself to hold on to Flash as a tool to use when we do need that type of thing.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a web developer myself, not a flash developer, and I love Mike’s site, and envy that he’s able to ignore IE users and make a site that is at the top of the heap when it comes to advanced technology. I’m also an advocate of the open web, and pushing to drop flash where there is a better, more open solution available. But I’m also a realist, and I’m just trying to give a more realistic perspective of someone that doesn’t quite have the luxury of ignoring a large segment of the market.
