Macromedia Flash : A New Hope for Web Applications

Summary of white paper by christine perfetti and Jared Spool


vwasia.com

Visualiser:
Flass app lets you drag and drop engine types, interior fabrics and extras depending on their availability in the country u live. You can 'bookmark' your car once u are done.

vw.com tries to do the whole thing with html and the experiences are dramatically different.

https://reservations.ihotelier.com/onescreen.cfm?hotelID=2054&languageID=1

One sheet allowing to book rooms. Neat logical interface, relying on mounds of backend data

www.moen.com
Allows you to design your own rooms by choosing colors, fixtures and models of equipment offered by vendor. Not very nicely implemented but the concept can be dramatically improved by linking it to a realtime database of availability and let the customer do all the design.

The cool part is the updated invoice

80's Client-Server just coming up.
cheap and more processing power.

Dumb client >> smart client
mainframes >> desktops
Text absed >> GUI based
Server Side processing >> client side processing

HTML comes in and pushes control back to server.

Document model designed to send and receive hypertext. So linear, page based stuff. Not designed for rich web apps.

Java, Active x , DHTML jump in to fill the gap. But flash makes the biggest splash.

Immediate feedback w/o page refresh

Mortgage calculator

Greying out stuff no longer needed ( Once VISa is chosen, grey out other types of cards)

Better and intuitive validation

Gives user control of all pixels. So any part of screen can expand or collapse with a new menu. Not possible with HTML.

Invisible client-server interaction.

dumb browser vs smart app

Large amounts of data/options grouped and presented at one spot

Rich, Graphical data representation :

warzone explorer