The Future is Flash?

Adobe's Flash is one program pushing the boundaries of interactive design. Gone are the days where Flash was simply used to develop boring and often irritating introductions to sites. It allows designers and developers to build truly interactive sites, draw content from content management systems and therefore has become much more than just a simple aesthetic element in sites.

The Future of Flash and Search

In the past, web designers always faced the problem that if they chose to develop a site in Flash the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was presented in another way that search engines could find.

Those days may soon be over. According to the official Google blog this could change very soon. Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files, and although this is not completely successful yet, this is good news for Flash Developers and digital Agencies.

The Future of Flash and Mobile

Taking into consideration the rapid growth in mobile technologies and the mobile market in South Africa, consumers are able to access the internet on their mobile phones or PDA’s. This brings along new opportunities but also new challenges for web designers.

Apple's iPhone with its Safari browser is hailed by many as the champion phone for mobile internet browsing, yet the iPhone still comes with Flash Lite, and not a full Flash player, leaving Flash driven websites out of the reach of the Cellphone browser. Although there were rumours at the Flash on Tap conference about Adobe working on a fully functional Flash player, this could be a fair amount of time before its true release.

It leaves the question to be asked, could Flash become the be all and end all of web digital design in the future?

In my opinion, this is not on the cards just yet, I believe although some strides have been made regarding Flash, it will not replace CSS based sites as web standards just yet.