When looking at the future of web animations Flash is the place to look. Adobe Flash has so many advantages over animated GIFs there are few reasons to stick with GIF and it’s frame by frame animations. The only advantage to GIF over Flash is that a user doesn’t need to have downloaded Flash Player to see it. Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages of Flash over GIFs.
Disadvantages – Adobe Flash Player is required to be installed to see or interact with the Flash.
Advantages - Smooth animations, small size, user interaction, easier to edit in large scale projects, more supported colors.
Flash is powerful enough to include user interaction through the mouse and keyboard but also through other devices like webcams. It can also be smaller in some cases which reduces overall size (compared to GIFs loading every frame of the animation as if it was a separate image). Both support transparency and Flash doesn’t have the color limitations GIFs do.
Flash is the future for web animations. You can download a 30 day trial from Adobe to start learning it today.
