Graphic Design Blog > Mapping UI: Flash vs. Ajax

http://svartling.hopto.org/informatory [informatory] John Dowdell at Macromedia has hit out at Ajax compared to Flash for something like a mapping UI (Flash example here): I'm slow on this -- Paul Neave posted it Friday -- but it's a great example of how a... [Read more]

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techno.blog("Dion")http://www.almaer.com/blog  techno.blog("Dion"): I am a little concerned with not having just a simple browser interface ( ajaxian ?), as already I feel differently changing gears from: Cool. Will check this out quickly to: On man, I have to install something? (via Cosmos)

http://www.techcrunch.com  TechCrunch: (the new hotmail with Ajax) hasn’t launched yet, but the Start.com team (profile) has been working on it seriously since May 2005 and it is now in private beta testing (updated). From posts by the Kahuna team (see below) and various beta testers ( and others watching the space), it looks like it as as signifcant an enhancement to Hotmail as Start is to the old MSN portal. (via Cosmos)

http://benbarren.blogspot.com  ben barren - rss'ing down under: (the new hotmail with Ajax) hasn’t launched yet, but the Start.com team (profile) has been working on it seriously since May 2005 and it is now in private beta testing (updated). From posts by the Kahuna team (see below) and various beta testers ( and others watching the space), it looks like it as as signifcant an enhancement to Hotmail as Start is to the old MSN portal. (via Cosmos)

Coding In Paradise: Ajaxian (via Cosmos)

[Ajaxian Blog] Mapping UI: Flash vs. Ajax: Compare zooming -- the Macromedia Flash Player can zoom in or out itself (animated if desired), where Google Maps and MSN VE require a trip back to the server for fresh bitmaps if scaled -- no flash of white, no loss of context, and the specific source imagery is smoothly streamed in for best resolution over time.

[JD on MX] Mapping UI, SWF vs AJaX: 8) [soapbox] The varied JavaScript engines will continue to converge and become more capable, but other engines are simultaneously growing too -- you could go to a downloadable native-code engine like Google Earth or many Microsoft initiatives, or you could use least-common-denominator browser abilities like much of the AJaX work, or you could use a single neutral, portable, easy-to-accommodate engine like the Macromedia Flash Player to abstract away all the differences and provide predictable advanced abilities. Three different approaches: native, LCD, or universal.

webmapper | what the map can behttp://www.webmapper.net [webmapper | what the map can be] iPod plus maps equals...: The new iPod Colour displays 25 full-colour thumbnails at a time, and with the touch-sensitive Apple Click Wheel you can scroll through them the same way you scroll through song titles. When you see a photo you like, you just click the centre button to see it in full.

[Flash, Central, and Flex Component Developer - Jesse Warden dot Com] Coding Challenge vs. Reasonable Gain: Flex automatically handles the tabbing (where it's a pain in the neck in Flash), but both allow ALL data to be saved and created into the data-model in real-time with the added ability to hand that data model off to the server-side in something it can easily understand without the page refresh, something AJAX currently cannot do without a lot of overhead parsing. You can cache the data locally in case occasional/disparate connectivity is an issue, and post later if needed, just like cookies are used in HTML forms, but with the added feature of treating it as a native object;

[Davidtemkin.com] davidtemkin.com: Welcome to the Ajax reality distrortion field. This one post about replacing Flickr's Flash UI with a DHTML UI seems to sum up these contradictions rather .

[Blog.flickr.com] FlickrBlog: We've made some changes to the photo pages, converting them from Flash to DHTML, which our own in-house DHTML guru, Eric Costello, presented at this past week's AJAX summit sponsored by O'Reilly and Adaptive Path. There are, of course, still key parts of the site that use Flash, but the biggest change is on the photo pages.

http://www.jonathanboutelle.com [Jonathanboutelle.com] Flash RIAs vs. Javascript RIAs: There is in general a need for accessible documentation on closures, DOM scripting, and Ajax, and I've been wanting for the past six weeks to devote some serious time to the task, but don't know to whom to pitch the copy. ALA's already covered it as much as they're likely to, SitePoint's and ORA's editorial policies are at odds with my style ('sides which I've no contacts at ORA), and while I've got carte blanche at WaSP I would be constrained by the need to do everything in a compliant context - atop the fact that we're in the early stages of a redesign, so I don't want to get my ambition on there 'til the redesign's done.

http://manish.revise.org [Manish.revise.org] Manish's Flex Blog: Backbase RIA: Flex UI components, forexample, are designed to automatically resize themselves to accomodate achange in the font size (I haven’t seen this in Ajax UI, including Gmail)(what’s missing is a web browser event informing Flex about the font sizechange). Flex applications are capable of saving their state in (andrestoring state from) the web browser’s navigation history without any extracoding on the part of the Flex developer.

Weblogs.asp.nethttp://weblogs.asp.net [Weblogs.asp.net] Tough UI design call: Flash, DHTML, XSLT, CSS, AJAX?: I'm considering putting the data in an XML file and formatting it via XSLT & CSS, or doing a clever Flash thing, or doing some sort of DHTML thing with folder tabs, or maybe calling everything from some XMLHTTP process and leveraging AJAX (I've been wanting to put that into production).

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