During my time online ive seen ALOTof animation programs,flash,gif maker,ect ect..but the one that stands out the most is of course flash,flash has alot of good features,everything is easy on it,and once you get the hang of it you can do just about anything on it.is there better? what is worse? what are YOU opions and questions

This post has been edited by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG: Feb 11 2006, 03:38 PM

Well, Flash has vector graphics, meaning its designs are all calculated and drawn by the viewers' computer, instead of just made up of billions of little pixels, like gifs. Flash is much better when you're making a long animation, since you can reuse something you've drawn over and over again in the movie without dramatically increasing the filesize. It's very easy to draw and animate in Flash.
GIF makers are meant for making short movie clips that loads fast over the Internet. Its colors are very limited, its quality is bad, and it can't enlarge and shrink like Flash can. Also, most GIF makers don't have a lot of useful tools for drawing.

So, for animations that are over a minute, Flash would always be better than GIFs in filesize and quality. However, if you're just making a short looped animation, GIFs would be smaller in filesize in most cases.

Flash is the best.

the vectors rally help with quality and there is the use off keyframes

though it comes at a price

I agree, flash is the best for complex and quality designs.
If you just need to do some quick animations, say a few frames then gif will be the best option, but it tends to be quite choppy.
Also high quality flash can really drag some computers down because of all the cpu and video rendering it needs, but at least you can adjust the quality level to get better performance.

I never really liked flash, or flash only sites, it takes time to load them, but that is not the main problem, maybe only for people who are using dialup or has a slow connection. Gifs are a little bit annoying if not done well, some gifs are pretty good, but I think that gif should be left alone and be forgotten, except for little animations or smiles.

I like flash only for movies/animation to watch, but as I said not the sites, but flash really comes in handy by adding it to the site as a menu or banner and stuff, where it looks just like a site, but the content is normal.. What I hate is the sound flash makes, I wish it could firstly ask or something, because I usually am listening to music and it gets on my nerves. To answer your question I think that flash is much better than gif, but I think it needs to be used properly.

FLASH is the way to go for animation. It's a multi purpose software. I use it for websites like for headers and whatnot while myfriend uses it to make flash games. Another friend of mine uses it for cartoons. It's the best program so far for animation. But if you want to create 3d animation i prefer using something else like 3ds max, cinema 4d or bryce--not really bryce i think it's better for still images, but it's still good. Flash 8 has a lot of features for web design. It's got the tools you need for animation and you've got ActionScript for gaming. so yeah Flash is the way to go, go but it it's worth it.

yes flash only sites are a bit boring.. but used properly on your site.. it can make a huge difference and make it look nicer to lots of people.. mainly girls... and girls are better to get to your site cause they buy silly stuff sorry if i sounded sexist hehe.. i love my gf very much hehe

I have been using Macromedia Flash for almost 4 years now and every update they did to the the software was really impressive and makes me keep the old Macromedia Flash CD installer in my cd rack and buy the new version in the market.

In my 4 years of web designing career, I can see that people are really impressed with even a simple Flash Presentation. What I mean is, flash is a very helful tool for web designing tool to impress more surfers that are visiting your site.

And because of Macromedia Flash, my web designing career stays on top.

Yes, Flash, for me simply and still the best tool for web animation.

Well, Flash isn't "yet another web animation software"... It's THE web animation software!

Sure, nothing competes with Flash because... well... there is basically no competition. Don't get me wrong, Flash is indeed a great tool... too bad it's fairly unique in its kind.

I've seen loads of Flash animation and there is some really cool stuff you can do with it, if you get around how poorly one can draw with a mouse and take over ActionScript (which is easy if you can program in, say... Java).

Anyway you should never EVER try designing a full website on Flash. It may work fine in most cases, but sometimes it's either just too damn slow to load (preloading scripts will go around most of these cases), or your page gets real ugly real fast, or you take a LOT more time to do your site than in HTML, or it simply won't work correctly on certain browsers (seen stuff work on IE but not on Firefox and vice-versa).

However, if the only thing you're after is doing some nifty animations and you expect your visitors to have at least 128kbps or your "Flashies" are just a few (10-100) KB big, it's definitely better than gif pictures.

Well Flash is a great program to use for vector based animations and drawings. Ive been learning aabit of it, but can get abit complicating when making animations, it must be hard for you cartoonists and aniamtion makers. Lmao, I think Flash does a great job in offering alot of features and thinga you can do with it.