I recently watched this video on Sparkle by a group of its developers. Sparkle, Microsoft’s supposed answer to Macromedia Flash, first surfaced in 2003 but has remained pretty hush-hush until recently. Okay, so it could easily encourage a bunch of office spacers to migrate their monstrosities from PowerPoint, but Sparkle actually looks pretty good. The developers in the video really emphasize how authoring can be done effectively without coding (although a code panel is available). That really made me wonder if working with Flash has gotten me farther, or closer, to what I’m really interested in—clearly conveying an idea.

I once read a 1986 article “The New Workstation: CD ROM Authoring Systems” by Marc Canter (found in this book), founder of Macromind (yes, later Macromedia) and I was amazed at what an innovative concept this creative software started as—there was no XML, ECMA, Lingo, ActionScript, etc. It was simply a way to convey a “music score,” a “composer,” a “stage,” and a “director.” These simple analogies were easy for anyone to relate to, especially artists. I remember starting with Flash 4 and the simplicity of the timeline. Now, I don’t even use the timeline; everything is code. ActionScript has slowly started to mimic into the class structure Java and C++, places I’d never thought I’d have gone (or wanted to have gone) before.

Granted, the community asked for this. We all remember Adobe’s failure with LiveMotion. When the coding structure was removed from Web animations, it eliminated the possibilities and the created a glass ceiling of learning. Macromedia has successfully converted generations of artists into programmers, but are we any better off?

This entry was posted on Friday, October 21st, 2005 at 12:34 am and is filed under webdesign. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.