Alternatives to Flash Animation?

When looking for alternatives to Flash animation, one has two basic choices; stay in-house with Macromedia products and utilize Macromedia Shockwave, or utilize GIF animations. Sometimes Flash is not affordable enough for independent web designers and they will need to look at alternatives. Shockwave is widely used in the delivery of online mini-games and cartoons and provides a very similar graphic quality to flash-rendered animations, while a GIF animation is usually a shorter, choppier, color-depth lacking piece.

Shockwave is a powerful program and language but definitely also has draw-backs. Its strengths include the ability to deliver audio and video in an attractive and easy to use format. The quality of said visuals is on par with Flash, most would agree, but frankly, this is where the benefits stop. Nearly 100% of all browsers have the Flash plug-in but nearly none have the Shockwave plug-in. The install file for the plug-in is considerably larger than that of the Flash one and sometimes the web browser will confuse the two and try to play one file with the wrong extension. It is also “not optimized for web delivery” as the author of the article would put it. It is better at using local files, not ones it has to download or stream via Internet.

The second alternative is to use GIF images. GIF's can be produced via the Flash software, Adobe ImageReady/PhotoShop and some third-party software programs. At its core, the GIF is a series of images with adjustable playback rate and the ability to preserve transparency, thus allowing some serious flexibility for web use. Also, file size is relatively small and is able to be displayed easily on most browsers. The downside to GIF's is that the animation is rarely as smooth or rich as a Shockwave or Flash one, and there is a serious lack of color depth.

What this all really boils down to is this: although there are alternatives to Flash, none can come close to offering the flexibility, power, and eye-candy of Flash. The author of this article has an obvious bias towards Flash and I can fully understand why. With the closest competition struggling to keep close, Flash has a clear, unrivaled stranglehold on web development as the top media-delivery platform. Audio and video together, relatively small file sizes, and plenty of vector-style rendering grunt.

In my opinion, Flash should be even more widely utilized by web developers and pushed to the utter forefront of the “new” Web 2.0. I see this being the new wave in web design to deliver the ultimate of experiences for web users and designers alike.

-Keegan (the ONLY pc guy)