FLASH

Few things can make one want to back straight out of a site than the ''Please wait while intro loads'' message displayed by a flash intro or flash based site particularly here in South African where Telkom has made it prohibitively expensive for the average Internet user to afford high speed connections. What makes it worse is when one does wait to see the intro and it turns out to be seemingly pointless and adds little to the informative value of the site.

Do not get me wrong! I love flash and enjoy working with it and have even created an award winning animated cartoon using it along with Legendary South African cartoonist Lencel.

To question the power of flash would be foolhardy. Flash is immensely powerful both for creating all types of presentations, web site banners and entire web sites but like all technologies it should be used correctly.

One of the strong points of Flash is its ability to stream data across the Internet on demand. This means that, when served over the Internet, it should not be necessary, in most cases for the entire flash file to download before it can commence playing. If used correctly there should only be a short delay before the intro or site can begin playing as the remainder of the file streams in off the net.