For the longest time, I’ve thought that Flash was completely evil. It would appear that I’m not the only one. But I’m starting to have second thoughts about the issue. Maybe the problem with Flash is that it has been done badly for various websites (e.g. like this). Core functionality like navigating a website should only be done with HTML. Of course, the insidious Flash intro is also a big no-no. There are a narrow range of applications  (e.g.  timbuk2 byob) which seems better suited to the richer content that Flash can offer. I guess the richer content is not unlike what the Mozilla folks have tried to do with XUL. IMO, Flash works better because it is supported by more browsers both good and crappy *cough*ie*cough*.
There is big push to supply this form of rich content with the use of Javascript especially from the folks at google. Gmail, Google Suggest, Google Maps. Need I say more… It turns out that Javascript (and it derivatives) are turning out to become the defacto scripting language for the client side of web applications and Flash is no different (although I suspect that Flash might be easier to program).

You might be curious about what made me reconsider… [FLASH ALERT!!!]

Capital Hill Weather Right Now ….

You have to admit that’s a pretty cool demo. Laszlo offers a couple more here, here and here. They also have a pretty nice tutorial. Most of the demos come with source and the Laszlo framework itself is covered by the CPL (not an overly bad license if you ask me). Reminds me of the weather app offered by Konfabulator. It is closer in philosophy to the Dashboard in the next version of Mac OS X, Tiger. The key difference is that Laszlo can deliver these apps to any flash enabled browser. Imagine having a personal portal page which you can access from almost anyway and being able to pull up rich interactive content. It would have a calendar, address book, and a dashboard to consolidate all the bits of your life. I wouldn’t want to try and do that with straight HTML and Javascript, but I’m intrigued by the idea of using Laszlo for these sort of tasks.