Simon Willison’s Weblog

Glastonbury Flash

24th June 2002

I’m headed off to Glastonbury on Thursday and I’ve been checking out the offical festival website. It’s pretty good—the information I wanted was all there, it was easy to find and the site has a pleasant enough look to it. Then I tried the interactive flash map (warning: spawns popup). Running on my Dad’s brand new Pentium 4 1.8 GHz desktop, the opening intro animation ran like an absolute dog and took over a minute to finish. There was no “skip intro” option and no way to turn off the irritating music until the intro had finished. Once it had loaded the map was quite useful—you can overlay paths, information points and other bits and pieces straight on to the map which is a decent enough reason to use flash. Unfortunately the pointless, jerky 3D intro meant I very nearly gave up in disgust before I got to the good stuff.

Message to Mook: If you absolutely have to use an animated intro give people the option to skip it (I thought the general Flash community got the hang of this idea several years ago). Luckily the Glastonbury site offers non-flash alternative methods of accessing the information in question, which are generally much faster and more intuitive than the interactive map anyway.