Loaded 1.0: Tribute to a Dying Skill/Art Form

Like most things trendy and erratic with the fickle mistress that is the Web, when the conversation of "2.0" came into play people quickly dumped the skill of designing in and for Flash to hump the no-need-for a web page, skinned, high user-updatability and free hosting space of the blog-styled look, feel and function of Web 2.0 in all it's many facets. But when this happened, as it usually does, major trendy progress has one of two effects: obvious progression of the standard or a a vapor trail of burst bubbles from an overloaded trend humped to death (see dot-com bust of yesteryear).

Flash got a bad wrap because of its own trendy early overuse and further shot holes in the other foot with low content management ability, weak-sauce on search engine optimization, and the over-complicated, superbly cryptic upgrade to Action Script 3. But that doesn't negate the skills that many developed to bend this medium to absolute creative awesomeness. The test of a true Flash designer's skills was the often dreaded and highly necessary 'preloader' that let you know all the tasty goodness was soon to be pouring into your eye sockets and it had the loading progress percentages to prove it.







One site has gathered some of the coolest examples of such preloaders into a killer killer-loop of yum!

PRETTY LOADED

Thanks to Friend of RDQLUS, Daniel Schutzsmith for the link.