Is Flash good or bad?

Flash is a tool to add animation, video and other multimedia elements to web pages.
Now i understand that it is a technology for increasing the user experience for a website or atleast thats what it is meant to be. But is it? I have heard other people complaining that flash is an evil disease infecting the web. Now this makes me wonder if there is any truth to what they say. I am not a web developer so my point of view is that of an average user and thats what i share in this article with you.

Flash seems to be everywhere, out of the 100(non-tech ones off course as you will rarely find an implementation of flash in a technical site ) websites i visit, i find that flash has been used(overused) in almost 70% of them. Is that good, well if you ask me NO!. While i understand that the developer was simply trying to make his site look very attractive but only only ends up creating distractions for the user and i as an user fail to to accept that. Say i am looking for a particular bit of information on the web and i search on google and get a list of sites. I click on the first promising site i find, excited and all but alas some Picaso has put a flash intro on it so i must wait for it to load and then click the skip button to access what i came for but that s only if i don't get too irritated and click the X button on the browser).

Another problem is too much glitter. Some websites look like a girl who just got herself a lifetime supply of cosmetic and used it all on the same day. Looking at pages such as this it makes you think how did they manage to find space for the real content amidst all these flash adds. Hunting for the valuable information on a page like this searching for a needle in a haystack. And then there is the ting that irritates me the most, moving animation doing anything and everything it can to stop me from reading the content. A small advice for all those “animator turned web designer” when i want to watch animation movie i will watch an animation movie. I am am an admirer of the art of animation and truly feel that animation has a place of its own(an its not web pages meant to deliver information). Also when flash is used to deliver the content of a website it basically takes able the capability of a user to interact with the content. You have to sit a watch the entire show to get the information you are looking for. BORING!

I recent had an experience where i was supposed to work with another guy on designing a small website for our neighbourhood community. What i did not know was that this guy was Flash enabled. Initially i agreed to put some flash here and there to add colour to the site but that had to drop the project because the guys was hell bent on making everything move like the background, the the heading, the text. I started getting dizzy looking at the pages he created and finally had to drop out of the project as it started giving me a serious headache.


Now to end this article i would like to state that i still feel if used in a proper and well thought out manner flash can contribute to the web. Like i have no issue with a site that is displaying a flash video as its main content because here flash has a purpose. It acting as the medium to to provide the main content and not distracting the user and when you are watching a video, you are not looking to physically interact with the content in any case. So i feel that the use of flash should be be minimalistic and sensible. This way flash can be used a a tool to enhance the user experience of a website and not give the user a migrane.

Say hello to BOSS

We Linux enthusiasts have a great variety of distros to choose from for our desktop or to even experiment with. We use different distributions and compare them. We often develop a sense of favouritism towards a particular brand and tend to stick to it. When I look around I find my friends using Ubuntu, openSuse, Linux mint and etc. All foreign distributions from various countries and which in turn made me think “what about India? Haven't we made any good distros?? ”(Please forgive my ignorance). So I decided to search and distrowatch.com presented me with a list of 5 Linux distributions of Indian origin but sadly their current status of usage and development is showing as dormant. Which proves that somewhere we overlooked or forgot to acknowledge the hardwork put in by our own countrymen.

So why that? Are these Indian distros not good enough to use? I decided to pick one of these and take an even closer look.

BOSS Linux

BOSS or the Bharat Operating Systems Solutions is an Linux distribution of Indian origin developed by NRCFOSS (National Resource Centre for Free/Open Source Software). BOSS is a Debian based free operating system distributed under the GNU General Public License. BOSS Linux is compliant with the 'Linux Standard Base' and thus is 'LSB' certified. It has support for both

Intel and AMD x86/x86_64 platforms. Yon can get more information from its official website www.bosslinux.in.

Colours of BOSS

BOSS Linux is available in both desktop and server editions. Its has had four major releases with the code names as follows:

• Sethu
• Tarang
• Anant
• Tejas

Tejas was the last major release that came in September 2008. BOSS comes with both KDE and GNOME user interfaces. But perhaps the most exciting feature about BOSS is the availability of the operating system in various Indian Languages. Here is a list of a few:

• Assamese
• Bengali
• Hindi
• Punjabi
• Sanskrit
• Telugu
• Marathi

and the list continues.

Using BOSS

I personally had downloaded the boss30rc1livecd.iso for liveCD(you can get the desktop version if you like) and ran it on my laptop. It took just a few minutes to load and then presented me with a rather pleasant looking gnome desktop. I found that all of the required applications and system configuration tools(gui) were present in there rightful places. Thus one should be able to feel right at home in no time. The Default file browser is Nautilus and the web browser is Iceweasel. It also has the Pidgin internet messenger. It also comes with the universal access tools like E-speak and Orca Screen reader.

Adding More

Being a Debian based distro BOSS inherits the Debian package management system with the dpkg tool and also the almost endless .deb software package repository. So if there is any FOSS software on your mind, you are mostly likely to find a .deb file for it and thus you can get it installed on this distribution. Off course BOSS also comes with its GUI Add/Remove software tool under systems > administration.

Support issues

The Support model designed for BOSS is divided into two parts. First there is the online support forum hosted on its official website www.bosslinux.in. The second is the downloadable PDF manual that comes with each release of the distro. I downloaded the manual and found it to be a 220 page comprehensive guide book or tutorial for anyone willing to use the operating system. It is written in an easy to comprehend language thus allowing a user with zero Linux experience to come to terms with the distro in no time.

More Features

The server edition of the software is said to be quite feature enriched. It can be used as a web server, proxy server, database, mail, network, file and print server. It is packed with advanced tools like webmin, Gadmin, PHP myadmin, PHP LDAP admin and several others. Thus it is suitable for use at a work enviroment as well as being an easy to use desktop distro.

Then why Dormant?

Coming to the end of this article my question to you is why is it that the last release for BOSS was is 2008? why is this operating system marked as a dormant distribution in Distrowatch.com?

I not asking anyone to stop using popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu or Fedora but I do feel these Indian projects need our support, acknowledgement and encouragement. Not just because they are developed by our country but because they too are good products that can strengthen the FOSS movement in India and take it to a whole new level.