Ian O'Brien

Ian O'Brien

Director of Digital Marketing Joined over 8 years ago

  • 0 stories
  • 20 comments
  • 3 upvotes
  • Posted to Pure CSS animation, in reply to Mihai Vladan , Aug 14, 2018

    You're clearly very passionate about Flash. I'm not arguing that Flash wasn't a good platform for the time but it certainly isn't up to snuff now... and I'm not just talking about it not being maintained. It simply doesn't follow globally accepted browser standards at it's core.

    One of the problems with something like Flash is you get all the stuff loaded into the player that you talked about. You can't choose to not load everything. Do you need native desktop integration on a website? Unlikely. For the other things you mentioned, the browser actually has access to most of them.

    You're also choosing to say that Apple has a locked down ecosystem, which certainly is true, but patently ignores that Apple only locks down what is published as software within it's own system. You are not required to have an Apple laptop to do web development; you could do the same thing with a Raspberry Pi running Linux. That's the beauty of an open web. You don't need to spend thousands of dollars to access or develop websites, and.... eh, to be honest, you seem smart enough to realize that. This argument is pretty moot.

    Many of the things we're also ignoring about Flash are important and can't be supported by Flash, like accessibility. Flash screws over people with screen readers. How about SEO? What about sites that require translations and localizations? Database storage? Integration with APIs?

    Apple didn't kill Flash. Flash killed Flash because it's not an open system with the flexibility to meet the needs of modern development or animation.

    1 point
  • Posted to Pure CSS animation, in reply to Mihai Vladan , Aug 12, 2018

    Ah, yes. Yes it is progress.

    In order to run Flash, you must download the 20MB and proprietary Flash plugin from a third-party site.

    Then, as a developer, you must maintain either thousands of dollars worth of software, or you must pay into a subscription model in order to even begin to think about developing animations.

    Instead, what was done here was to create a fast, performant animation that works cross-browser, loads lightning fast on mobile, and doesn't absolutely destroy your battery.

    Honestly, what's missing here are better tools in order to animate with HTML and CSS.

    If you want to compare sizes (giggity), compare at least 20MB to run an animation, versus the combined whopping 320KB (yes, KB) it took to create this, and then tell me there isn't progress as the animation runs buttery-smooth no matter where it loads.

    8 points
  • Posted to Alternatives to Hotjar for form tracking?, Nov 21, 2017

    Depends what you're wanting to do and how granular you're wanting to get.

    We've had great success with Heap Analytics which tracks all user clicks. You can use it to generate reports so you can see where your users drop off. Especially useful if it's a multi-step form.

    1 point
  • Posted to Comparison of the most popular no-code web-site builders, Nov 16, 2017

    Aside from this just being an advertisement, it's deliberately misleading and vague. I know for certain that Webflow has "Custom logic" (what does that even mean?) as well as pulling data from a database... how else is the content stored? You can also definitely do "custom code", although this is pretty vague, too. And completely confused as to what "Automated servers" are, or why anyone building a site on a site builder would care about that.

    2 points
  • Posted to How to become a better designer, in reply to Vikky Rathore , Jul 16, 2017

    I dunno if customizing a pre-made template is really "designing," but I guess that's open to interpretation: http://demos.templateexpress.com/sporty/

    5 points
  • Posted to Show DN: Oppression Check, Jan 10, 2017

    There's so much information and decision making when it comes to hiring candidates. I get what you're trying to do, but your interface ignores this complexity, or at least doesn't provide enough context. It appears that you're saying you should hire someone based only on their gender, religion, or sexual orientation. Your introduction video isn't even linked on your webpage, so it comes off as distinctly opinionated and anti- certain religions, races, and orientations.

    4 points
  • Posted to Wyre — Global Bank Transfers, Faster than Email, Dec 28, 2016

    Beautiful.

    Also, no form validation. Sent a request with everything empty except phone number which i put as "5". Hope you don't get flooded with invalid requests!

    0 points
  • Posted to Ask DN: How does Adobe XD stack up against Sketch?, in reply to Brian Fryer , Jul 14, 2016

    The SVG export is the single greatest headache with Sketch. Sometimes shapes also become distorted with resizing them, which makes the product unusable for production work a lot of the time.

    2 points
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