Flash is dead.

(well, sort-off) As you may know it’s no longer developed for mobile phone which will run HTML 5 for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.
Desktop wise it may stick around for (quite) some time though until HTML 5 matures and can do what Flash can do now.

Now I already cut from the 4F site a boatload back on Flash compared to the past. Yes, I once even had my entire site wrapped up in flash. Not too many liked it but that wasn’t the reason why I killed it. The reason was that it was way too clumsy to maintain and update on a regular scale.
On a side note if you want your site to be found and indexed by searchbots, which is good so you get more visitors, you never ever, ever, build your site out of flash. Because search bots cannot index it and that is bad m’kay?

A few weeks ago I got fed up maintaining the image scroll bar for the stuff section (3-4000 babes in tight shiny fetish gear) and decided for a new upload to just HTML it.
First thing that happened was I got a message saying something to the extend of, “great way to do this, you should do this for the rest because the old(er) Flash image scroll bars no longer function).

Why no one tells me so, when things are broken / do not work is a mystery to me. Especially if you pay for it.
Anyway, I fixed near 600 pages and then looked to the other thing that still uses Flash in the members area, the MNW (Mars Needs Women) section.

The old scroll wheel hating MNW timeline.

The big annoying thing is that user wise you cannot scroll, anywhere. You must click on an up or down arrow before things start to move. Very, very inconviniant: click, click, click, etc. Oh, I could implement scrolling using Action Script (AS) 3, but then I have to recode the entire thing and relearn a whole lot of other stuff because things don’t work in AS 3 as they did in AS 2 or 1.

The new scroll wheel loving MNW timeline sans any Flash.

With the notion in the back of my head that Flash will die out and the fact that on Safari I no longer get any mouse over response from Flash in the timeline (so finding links gets tough) I set on the road to kick out flash and put in something that (hopefully) works better, is better to maintain, lets you use your scroll wheel and, for me most importantly let me design how the scroll bars look like, i.e. overide the crap Microsoft puts out.

The new timeline is much better readable, gives proper mouse over link indications and can scroll on a whim of your finger up or down. No more clickethyclickclickclickclickclickclick!

I’ve also moved the link from the MNW gallery from the top down to the timeline link. This way it is hard to miss and while I am busy I once again got rid of the Flash interface, which was to say the least, slightly annoying: and un-scrollable clickethy-click-click row of images with a near invisible red square that on mouse over revealed links to a low, medium or high render of the small thumbnail.

The old badly implemented (rush job) MNW flashed gallery.

The new scroll terrific MNW gallery.

I probably change the scroll items here. Vertically it’s ok, but horizontal it looks out of wack. I know it is not that important but I like to look at it and be able to say: ‘this looks, nice.’

It still needs some work but this will be how the new MNW (futuristic babes in tight shiny latex) interface will look like.

There are still 2 parts of MNW that use Flash. I still have to look over those to see if it is possible to replace the Flash stuff with semi advanced java/ jquery scripting. Not sure yet how to approach this. Time will tell.

In the meantime I began a new image. Just a pin-up girl in shiny white latex bridal underwear. Yummy!