Wednesday, 23 October 2002
Brent Simmons writes about switching from Eudora to Apple Mail, IE to Chimera, and dumping the Flash plugin. “Have I missed Flash? Are there other uses for Flash I'm sad about missing out on? Nope. I don't miss Flash in the least tiny bit.”
I use both Eudora and Mail (the beauty of IMAP), have switched almost entirely from IE to Chimera except for the very few sites I visit that use Java or the Windows Media plugin, and finally dumped the Flash plugin today: it causes about 99% of my Chimera crashes.
Unlike Brent, I do use and like Flash when it's put to creative uses rather than ads. One little-known feature of QuickTime is its Flash compatibility: starting with QuickTime 4, QuickTime version n supports Flash version n–1, which is sufficient to play the majority of Web content. QuickTime appears to do a much better job than the Flash plugin, and permits you to resize or navigate back and forward in Flash animations, great when you have a big screen (Flash is a vector format after all, so most animations scale smoothly) or want to watch just part of an animation. So, now when I really want to watch some Flash, I just view source, copy the .swf URL, and paste it into QuickTime Player's “Open URL” dialog box.
1:15 PM
