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Guess who took a Flash class this week
This Hiveminds discussion, "why do people hate flash?", is doing good job of outlining both the pro and con arguments surrounding Flash on the web. It also offers several examples of "good" flash and makes it clear that it's very important for designers to control the "gee whiz, look what I can do" impulse.
Robert Lindstrom's Being Visual, which I've already mentioned a couple of times (here and here), provided the main impetus for taking the course.
"As the technology gains a foothold and becomes more commonplace the market grows accustomed to the new technologies and expectations rise. For many companies, the bar has already been raised and rich-media communication is no longer an exception. It's an expectation. "People are becoming savvy enough to know that the capability is there. By not utilizing it you are conspicuous," says Jeff Sprau, Director of Product Sales for the Controls Group of Johnson Controls, Inc. "Please share, in the comments section of this post, any examples of Flash that you find particularly useful. Especially those that relate to pharma, medicine or biotech.
UPDATE: The "object" and "embed" tags used to insert Flash animations into web pages can't be rendered into valid RSS. Aggregators were showing the graphic attached to this post as a blank, blue box. Fortunately, Flash can also publish to animated .gif files which is what you're looking at now. It appears that the graphic's quality has only degraded slightly but the animation speed has slowed down considerably. Guess I'll have to start messing with the publish settings and repost.