When I worked for AKQA in London on the Nike UK business, I started there by working on probably the most challenging yet inspiring project of my career. We created a beautiful site called Nike Jumpstart UK with the goal of getting women back into fitness (by any means possible). On the project we worked with Paula Radcliff, marathon runner extraordinaire, Denise Lewis, Olympic triathlete, and a couple of other fitness fanatics. The website presenting some great fitness programmes to get us off our bums and out on the road running, in the gym, running around a field with a ball OR doing some home fitness exercises.
The year was 2004 and Nike’s approach to online with AKQA was to create beautiful and engaging website communications … in Flash. Absolutely all of their properties are done in Flash, from basketball, to football, running, Nike + iPod, etc, etc. They have invested an incredible amount of money producing beautiful web presences that have often been awarded ‘best in class’.
So I wonder what Nike make of Steve Jobs (head of Apple) and his commitment to kill Flash by not supporting this technology on any Mac product (particularly the new iPad). Well, it seems at least, Nike were prepared for the iPad with many of their properties providing a cut down, HTML version of their Flash content, which fulfills the need to provide content on this new platform, but what a terrible user experience when compared with the beautiful and emotive content that their “computer browser” versions afford us.
While Steve Jobs has some fair arguments as to why they are not supporting Flash, those mainly being:
- Flash is old technology where the future is HTML5 which is an open standard
- Flash is the number one cause of Macs crashing
- Flash has very poor performance on mobile devices – chews through battery life
- Flash websites aren’t (generally) touch compatible
… other web technology (from what I have experienced) just can’t match the movement, resolution, and glossy presentation of brand content that you can achieve with Flash (you only have to browse all the Nike sites to see that). That is, as I understand, until HTML5 is released and adopted by the masses … but that is still a technology that is the future and not the here and now.
What’s your view? Would you like to see the death of Flash along with Steve or should Flash be better supported by Apple?
No Comments