rose marshack : whyamistillawake.com

In answer to the previous post comment,

Flash is popular because it’s easy to use and you don’t need to know how to program in order to use it. You can make very shallow, gratuitous (but arguably beautiful) animations without knowing anything.

So back in the late 90s, early 00s, people were using flash all over the place and it made the web look much nicer than just plain tabled and framed html. If you used flash, things moved; circles got bigger, etc. It was vector-based, too, so it was small, quick load-times, and looked great. And every computer came with the flash player loaded, so everyone could watch words fading in and out and circles rotating.

Back then, the only people creating web pages were designers and programmers; content-creators (i.e. heads of companies and normal people) had no experience with the web and were just trying to understand what types of things should be on the web. So flashy, flash-driven shallow designs (like the kind you also find in processing) were ubiquitous; it was because there was nothing else available. Hired web designers didn’t know much about the company, and they shouldn’t; they were busy learning flash and dreamweaver.
Now, however, we have CONTENT. Everyone, even non-programmers AND designers, can create content. Everyone knows why the web exists. So there’s no need for crappy shallow spinny graphics; there’s more of a need for content and upkeep.

Unfortunately the rest of the world does not move as quickly as web innovators, so you still have company owners and ‘those who call the shots’ looking for Flash programmers so their sites “look modern.” It’s in job descriptions everywhere. It will be a couple more years before they realize that flash templates are available for under $100 all over the web, and that gratuitous animation is irritating - what we want to see is quick and constantly upgraded content (not something you usually see in flash-driven sites). Content management systems (CMS) are way more useful because content-creators can add information quickly and efficiently, without having to buy additional software authoring suites, and without having to pay someone $100 an hour to make circles and text fade in and out.

Now, Flash still has some very important uses. It is wonderful for web-delivered education / edutainment content; children’s games like you find on pbs and nick. I’ve made some educational game content using flash; it’s nice because again, most people have it. If I could use anything to make games, I’d probably use director, because I’m more familiar with the programming (and I am a programmer) but not everyone has shockwave player, which is necessary for viewing director-created content. The flash actionscripting environment used to be so disgusting that any self-respecting programmer wouldn’t take two minutes to try to figure out which catacomb of the authoring environment to hide their “on mouseUp” script, but I hear it’s much better now.
The one thing I hate most is if I’m on the web and I’m looking for content (which I usually am) - either for art information, or more likely, for something to buy - and I have to watch something slide in or fade in, or rotate in.. with tiny words sliding and fading in… it makes me insane. I’m on the web for content.

my 2 cents.