While I'm still working on the "There are way too many Jakob Nielsen bashers" rant, here a list of the things not to like about flash as observed on danish moblogging upstart albinogorilla.dk.
- Links don't work like they should I right click something that looks like a URL and get a stinking Flash player control menu. I want to 'copy link' or 'open in new window'.
- GUI animation sucks Yes, graphical user interfaces occasionally beat the command line (well, most of the time tehy do - it's just that when they don't they are so very annoying) - but slow show-off information free GUI animations are never what makies GUIs great . In fact I would like to proposa a temporal version of the Data/Ink ratio: The Use/Wait ratio: How much of the time the user spends in front of the site is spent with the information the user is interested in. A low Use/Wait ratio is indicative of bad design. GUI animation decreases the u/w.
- Copy-paste bites OK, this looks intentional - but even 'non link' text on this site is animation hell. I just want to copy-paste.
- Don't steal the bloody keyboard They have permalinks for individial moblog entries. Manually added to compensate for flash-suck, but still - they remembered to add them. The implementation is broken however: Clicking doesn't jump it selects. This is so counterintuitive they had to add text to explain it. Once I've copypasted the URL to the clip board I wan't to 'Alt-d' to the address bar. But I can't. The flash player has stolen the keyboard actions from the browser.
- Useless uses of flash just break everything There is nothing about the content of this site that makes flash essential. It is just a list of pictures. The sum of the above is a lot of breakage.
I'll stop being cranky now.
Well, then it's good that we DID implement HTML templates too for the less Flash-excited users. Check http://www.albinogorilla.dk/template1 . The Flash version is supposed to attract the not-so-tech-savvy users - and maybe users who want some slow show-off information free GUI animations (they ARE out there - we have actually gotten very good feedback on the template). And we have more templates in the works - both Flash and HTML - so although we don't kid ourselves in believing that we can fulfill everyones dreams of a moblog template at least there will be different templates to choose from.
We have also recently added RSS-output for those wanting to implement their moblog on their own site.
Actually the copy-pasting of permalinks to the address bar (CTRL+C -> ALT+D) works fine here.
All suggestions for improvement of our newly started service are of course welcome. Especially constructive criticism like yours (although a bit cranky, I agree ;) ). We would be very grateful to receive an email the next time you have comments/critique.