Ex-Macromedian here. It was the release of Flex (which generates Flash UIs by default) that started this trend. It was clear to me from the start that MM (now Adobe) had made a bad move with Flex because all the examples reimplemented basic HTML form + JS functionality in Flash, with a bonus "Loading" window at the start.
I know a lot of otherwise bright devs that were drawn to Flex by the MVC paradigms that littered the tutorials. Classic 'Architecture Astronaut' stuff as Spolsky would describe it which really didn't translate to delivery of better sites for users, especially once the JS frameworks took off.
In my view, the decision to trade off user experience and established standards for developer convenience is never the right one, but I guess it's a temptation if you're in the dev tools business.
It's almost as if they are trying to prove Jobs was right when he said code written non-natively sucks. (In this case, native would be HTML + Javascript).
Just an aside, because I happen to have encountered this recently: if the scroll wheel problem is in Firefox 3.6, it's probably because the Firefox dev team had one of their now-infamous "we know better than our users" moments and screwed up event propagation to embedded content so it works differently to all other browsers and all previous versions of Firefox. That change has messed up quite a few popular web sites, and affects Flash, Java applets, and any other similar plug-ins. For once, Adobe would be right to claim that this one isn't their fault.
The best part is that even Adobe can't get their own flash working well... A "TypeError: Error #1034: Type Coercion failed: cannot convert mx.collections::ArrayCollection@2377c381 to Array" exception popped up in a modal dialog when it loaded (I'm using the debug version of flash). Awesome.
When you change the first value from "Full" to "Upgrade" or vice-versa, an empty dialog box pops up, with no text and a Ok button. I have to clcik on it twice to dismiss it. IE on Win XP!
My god, I just realized that after looking at my scrollbar. Terrifying. I couldn't understand why two-finger scrolling wasn't working, and now I am disgusted.
Yeah - What on earth about that page suggests that it should be done in Flash, other than "it's possible to?".
I love my flash games, but that page is a amazing fail - my credit-card auto completion didn't work, my two-finger scrolling failed to work - it's almost like they are trying to demonstrate how _not_ to create an order page.
Not sure when they switched to a Flash-based store, but when CS4 was released the store was so overloaded you couldn't load the site. If you disabled Flash you could visit the HTML version just fine.
Interestingly if you view the page source you will notice there are 2830 characters of whitespace before the DTD. There are lots of weird tabs in there... It looks like the tabs are for some sort of server-side code that is being parsed/removed but the whitespace is being left in the rendered document.
That might seem like a small issue, but imagine how much traffic their site gets. ~2.8Kb of wasted bandwidth for every request...
Yeah, it's a misleading HN title. I thought the page was from a disgruntled designer too.
Though -- why does the source of their page start with 100 empty lines? Do they think it'll stop people from scrolling down and seeing the source of the page?
If you meant the "platform" in your Apple section to be iPhone/iPad SDK don't they require you to be on their expensive hardware and software platform (Mac and Mac OS X) too?
Adobe doesn't even force you to have its free flash runtime to use its products (that page degrades nicely for me without flash). Apple expects you to use their expensive Mac and Mac OS X to be able to build products using their SDKs. I don't see how Adobe is worse than Apple here! And there are flash sites with great user experiences too; so great user experience has nothing to do with just using Apple's SDK.
I'm by no means a Flash lover but this idea of making Apple the David and Adobe the Goliath is pathetic.
I clicked on the form wrong and suddenly the tab was filled with Chrome's "Aw, Snap!" error. I'm impressed at how Flash is enhancing web usability with rich graphics and multimedia experiences. (Error messages are an experience, right?)
If you run top while you're there you can see Safari and WebKitPlugin (I'm on Mac OS 10.6) start churning away in the %CPU column, even while you're doing nothing but reading a page.
It has been an Adobe Flex form for quite a while now. I have used it several times in the past and have never had a problem. Personally, I kind of like RIAs.
Does not require Flash (Chrome seems to be directed to HTML), but if you have Flash you will see the entire page is a Flash swf (except some people aren't seeing it, but it seems that most are).
The point isn't that it doesn't degrade, it seems to do that fine, the point is they did an entire webpage as a Flash movie, duplicating the scrollbar, all the page text... it's a complete disaster.
More like: a company's use of its own product to do something on its website demonstrates how poorly the product is suited to that particular activity.
And, yes, now we can all see why we hate Flash so much.
Adobe's attempt to create a proprietary web platform is destined to fail.