Stephen Keable

Since the arrival of the iPad and it’s lack of Flash support, lots of people have moaned about video and interactive elements on websites no longer working on many sites. We have then seen big PR and marketing pushes by lots of websites saying they are now iPad compatible.

The thing which hasn’t gotten as much press is that many websites are now showing very few adverts, as they were mostly created in Flash too, with some campaigns having basic fall back GIFs for the few non Flash users. This perhaps shows how little attention users pay to them nowadays.

However the commercial people behind many sites have begun to get worried and are looking into how to create their Flash adverts in a non-Flash format, the holy grail seems to currently be something from Adobe called renderFXG, which is a javascript tool which can render their FXG file format in the browser using the HTML5 canvas tags. This is the ideal solution as ad agencies can continue to use Flash to create ads then simply export them in a slightly different format.

The other option you have with existing tools is the dominant format from the pre flash days, the good ole’ fashioned animated GIF. Which is an art form unto itself, trying to create a good looking animated advert with a 256 colour palette whilst keeping the file size below 100k, can be pretty difficult.

Whilst Adobe beaver away at a solution and as HTML5 is still a draft standard, the animated GIF seems the only good compatible short term solution. So perhaps it’s time to brush up on the Photoshop animation skills again, or even see if ImageReady will still run on that old Mac in the office.