Why I don’t prefer Flash-based Web Mapping

Why I Don’t Prefer Flash-Based Web Mapping

November 6th, 2005 · 17 Comments · GIS

I posted over on The Map Room about that I didn’t care for the Flash viewer for Yahoo! Maps and a poster asked me to elaborate. Since I’ve upgraded to Flash 8.0, it seems to respond much faster than it did before (when I was still using Flash 7), but that brings up my biggest issue to way I don’t like flash as a viewer. I’ve always liked Autodesk Mapguide as a web mapping tool, but its biggest drawback was that you needed a plugin to get it to work and even then that plugin only ran on Internet Explorer. Back in the day this wasn’t such a big deal as almost no one used another browser than IE, but these days it just kills the product (there is a beta version of a Mozilla/Firefox extension available now).

Now Flash is cross browser and mostly cross platform so it really doesn’t have the same problems that Mapguide had, but the performance issues I had with an older version of Flash just proves my point that plugins aren’t the best way to view online maps, especially if there is no real reason to do so. Flickr used to have a flash interface which was nice, but since then they have moved to a AJAX interface that is so much better and works in any recent browser.

With AJAX you can use tools such as Greesemonkey to add features to websites that aren’t there (such as a delete button for Gmail) which is impossible with Flash. I guess as a programmer, I like to be able to work with just about everything on a webpage, rather than just have an embedded objection on the page. The Flash object becomes off-limits to me.

In the end since upgrading to Flash 8.0, I’ve begun to care less about getting rid of the Flash interface in Yahoo! Maps, but unless I see some real good reasons to use a plugin (eye candy isn’t one), I’d just assume not bother.

Tags: Programming·Yahoo! Maps

17 responses so far ↓

1 Allan Doyle // Nov 7, 2005 at 8:30 am
Perhaps Flash is less in the spirit of Web 2.0 as defined by Tim O’Reilly - http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

Some snippets from that article:
- Mitch Kapor once noted that “architecture is politics.”
- Users must be treated as co-developers
- Design for “hackability” and remixability
He also talks about the difference between doing “business with the head, not the tail, with the center, not the edges” and it seems to me that Flash does fit the model of keeping control at the head and the center. On the other hand, there are things that can be done in Flash that are probably harder to do in AJAX, at least today.
2 Phillip Holmstrand // Nov 7, 2005 at 11:33 am

The distribution isn’t a big issue I think. Pretty much everyone has Flash, many websites out there require it.

I think the main draw back to using Flash, is maps don’t look as good. Why? well it doesn’t support dynamically loading lossless formats like GIF or PNG. JPEG is good for photos, but looks terrible for maps containing mostly vectors and text labels.

Its too bad because I think Flash is a much nicer development environment than DHTML/Javascript.
3 Phillip Holmstrand // Nov 7, 2005 at 11:42 am

Footnote to my last post: Maps can look good in JPEG if you use anti-aliasing, which is what Yahoo! Maps appears to be doing.

No anti-aliasing goodies available from ESRI yet, so for now we will live in a jagged world (which looks better in lossless formats.)

Another possibility is Yahoo is transfering the actual vectors and letting Flash do all the rendering, this too can look very good (since Flash will anti-alias.) The new ArcWeb Services works that way.

Sorry for thinking out loud… =oP

-Phillip
4 Mikel Maron // Nov 8, 2005 at 3:07 am

For hackability, AJAX is easier yes. Flash is also hackable through decompilers, though yes, it’s more difficult.

AJAX doesn’t necessarily mean the service is aiming to support the Web 2.0 spirit. GMaps javascript code is very obfuscated, and the GMaps API was partially a response of necessity, to get focus out of the code.

Flash can be used in the spirit of cooperative development. It’s really about intentions. worldKit went open source recently.

http://brainoff.com/worldkit/opensource.php

Also, Flash Player 8 (finally) displays GIF, PNG, progressive JPEGs.
5 John Dowdell // Nov 8, 2005 at 4:30 pm

Thanks, James. Am I correctly understanding your paragraphs as “Minimize user hassle”?

If so, then installing Greasemonkey, after first moving to Firefox, seems a significantly greater user cost, true?

Making sure that a standard extension is in the browser seems much friendlier — doesn’t require an interface change, doesn’t require a habit change, is a very short download, and is already being adopted by the public at a record rate. (Macromedia Flash Player 8 got 100M downloads in its first month, and Firefox had 100M downloads of all updaters in its first year… no comparison.)
6 James Fee // Nov 8, 2005 at 4:43 pm

Oh, I wasn’t using Greasemonkey as an example of minimal hassle. What I was saying is that as a programmer, I like the ability to get at the heart of content.

When implemented correctly, nothing works better than Flash in a browser to ensure cross compatibility, but what cost to developers?
7 placemap » The Strange Case of Yahoo Maps // Nov 8, 2005 at 6:15 pm

[...] The new version of Yahoo’s mapping service has met with a lot of excitement and criticism. [...]
8 David Mendels // Nov 8, 2005 at 9:20 pm

Philip writes: “I think the main draw back to using Flash, is maps don’t look as good. Why? well it doesn’t support dynamically loading lossless formats like GIF or PNG.”

FlashPlayer 8 does support dynamically loading GIF and PNG. Yahoo isn’t using it yet…they target version 7, but this will be simple to implement later.

Regards,
David
9 Daniel Wabyick // Nov 9, 2005 at 10:56 am

Hey guys, a little opinion from a Flash developer’s perspective.

I think the fact that they are supporting three API’s for three different classes of developers is amazing. This allows the API to be “hackable” by myself, some Java geek who learned Flex, and the author of this blog.

Additionally, Yahoo includes search API’s which strongly differentiate it from Google’s current offering.

Finally, to plug the platform of my choice, Flash 8 adds an ability for expression that is not possible with DHTML, and I think that will become more apparent as time goes by. An example of this is Justin Everett-Church’s “Pirate Map” - http://justin.everett-church.com/ymaps/pirateMaps.html. Not saying this is the most useful example, but its an example of Flash 8’s new bitmap operations in use.
10 Curtis D // Nov 9, 2005 at 5:29 pm

Yahoo has both an AJAX and Flash API.

I think developers are over analyzing the technology for the common maps user who don’t care what technology developers are using, but whether the user experience is up to par.

both google and yahoo do a good job. both g and y have advantages and disadvantages. its just great to see these folks pushing technology and us a developers should be happy, not hating on any particular technology.
11 James Fee // Nov 9, 2005 at 6:07 pm

I will say the average user would like to right click on the map and save as. Can’t do that with flash.
12 Andreas Weber // Nov 10, 2005 at 1:23 am

> I will say the average user would like to right click on the map
> and save as. Can’t do that with flash.

This is just yet another misconception about Flash.
With Flash the developer can fully customize the right click menu.
It is perfectly possible to add a print menu item / function.

Cheers!
13 James Fee // Nov 10, 2005 at 5:58 am

So let me get this strait, flash can do all this cool stuff but no one ever bothers to use it on mainstream flash applications. I’ve seen some very nice flash applications from people that have posted here, but 99% of the flash I run into doesn’t do this.
14 The Idiot // Nov 11, 2005 at 10:34 am

James, Flash has so many powerful features that nobody uses on mainstream applications or even test projects. I am always amazed at how powerful it is, yet so many programmers look down on it. There is huge potential that nobody uses. I would love to get the time to do some amazing stuff with Flash, but right now I don’t have the time.

Flash’s power makes AJAX look like a wimp.

~ The Idiot
15 James Fee // Nov 11, 2005 at 10:40 am

Well maybe that is the problem. There are so many AJAX mashups out there that they are really pushing the envelope. Maybe some Flash folks need to take the Yahoo! API and run with it.
16 Cheapskate // Dec 1, 2005 at 5:06 pm

I like Flash myself and there is a whole lot of features to it too but one downside to working with Flash sometimes is that you need to have access to Macromedia Flash to develop or some SDK, which isn’t always free, compared to AJAX.
17 Michael // Apr 3, 2006 at 2:33 pm

Just some musings:

Google Maps has removed all right-click capability from Google Maps, an easy javascript trick. It seems that Google has a policy of not letting you save.

Microsoft Live Local has a cool right-click menu… (Though you also can’t save)

Yahoo! Maps use .SWF files for their tiles in the Flash version, the .SWF format for rasters is based on .PNG. There isn’t any JPG artifacting on their tiles, they are just in a format suitable to the environment. If you don’t want .SWF tiles, you can get PNG’s from their developer API, but this obviously shouldn’t matter on the consumer site.