I began using it in late 2000, as initially part of a student club I founded at my community college. Our mission was to spread web informational sources on financial aid, health, study abroad, and other topics of interest to students. It began in flash and looked kind of cheesy, but the functionality was amazing. One drag was the labor to update info and links [updating the source file of the applicable topic section, and republishing the movie], in comparison to using HTML and graphics…which I ended up learning and doing BECAUSE: all educational institutions’ published content had to be also accessible to the blind.
After beginning with a Flash 4 training video, Flash 5 came out and I got the student edition that came with two magenta manuals on the program itself and it’s highly expanded scripting language: Actionscript 1.0. It was a lot of fun and I interacted with a little social network / bulletin board back then called Were-Here.com, the best community forum for exchanging multimedia/web knowledge and various fun topics in a section called “Just Conversation”. This was an awesome community, similar to my experience in the blogosphere now, where people share stories, news, pictures, personal stuff, jokes, and sometimes play online games like iSketch.net (online pictionary)
I continued playing with Flash after transferring to my university, but slowly weaning off of it because well….I was a international business major with a lot of more important learning to do. After launching a small site for my study abroad group of 60 students to Germany in 2002, I completely gave up further development. At this point in time, many developers sensed a growing schism within the Flash community. The Actionscript language was growing quite complex beyond many people’s ability to further learn & improve their skills. Many folks thought, “Why not just use the same simple code we’d used in the past instead of creating complex proprietary systems for clients? It’s less time-intensive and I can get more done in other areas of design projects including illustration and HTML/CSS”. Some independent jack-of-all trade web designers were so enamored with Flash, they figured they’d just simply develop all their sites with it. Others got further involved with the language and specialized in this multimedia programming and helped take it to new levels within agencies and as freelancers.
But there was a backlash that continues to this day, surrounding unique situations regarding broken back buttons, no bookmarking, poorly designed content management systems, code that may need to be updated with newer browser plugin versions, and near invisibility to search engines among a host of other issues.
So last night, I met with fellow AoC author Pete Deutschman of The Buddy Group, a high-end multimedia and web development agency. They have an incredible team of developers that are very knowledgeable on Actionscript (now 3.0) and other programming languages, while creating some cutting-edge design solutions for clients. After speaking with some of their programmers, I was happy to learn that many solutions exist to make all my aforementioned problems disappear. That was really nice to hear; but unfortunately most independent developers and their clients aren’t in-the-know of some of these important limitations and workarounds. With my new enlightenment of Flash, I can’t really blame it because it’s just tech. It’s people who analyze needs, establish process flows, consider externalities, and develop appropriate client solutions based on available time, funds, and desired quality levels. That seems just about right 
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Have to seen Sketchplanet.com? Is similar to isketch.