The Necessity of Being One Step Ahead of the Game

Sometimes it’s challenging helping customers and prospects to understand not just where technology is, but where it’s going as well.

Over at the FOLIO blog there have been a few comments by Rex and others which make it sound as if the use of Flash – particularly within editorial – is inherently a bad thing. Generally speaking, these opinions come from those who’ve seen a lot of bad Flash (let’s face it, there’s a lot of bad stuff out there) or are unaware that the most clever of companies have long since overcome Flash’s lack of indexing.

But more important than this is the fact that users like Rich Internet Applications (many of which are built using Flash). According to a recent study by Forrester Research, "The awareness and preference of RIA’s is high (when compared to static HTML)." While the research goes on to point out some of the weaknesses of RIA’s that are rightfully pointed out by their critics, at the end of the day, users like them better and are more engaged when using them.

How could this work within a digital magazine? Let’s say you wrote an article about Body Mass Index and wanted readers to be able to relate to your content. You could do 1 of 3 things:

a. Give them the formula for calculating BMI and let them do it with pencil and paper (this is how it currently works in print).

b. Embed a standard HTML BMI calculator, like this one. It works and it gives a result.

c. Embed a Rich Internet BMI calculator, like this one. Same results in a more dynamic interface.

If the purpose of your content is to educate and engage your reader, which solution is best?