[michaelolenick]

I was in the middle of this way back when. Software I created (well, I prototyped and hired somebody else to create), won the very first Macromedia Rich Internet Application. It created name badges from a Flash app.

For those who don't remember -- and judging by the comments I think that'd be many -- there was no AJAX back then, and when I first saw AJAX I remember thinking that's the end of Flash.

It wasn't a love of Flash technology but a love of stateless UI that inspired our line of thinking. Stateless UI was possible with Java, and I first wrote the program that went on to win the award in Java, but Java looked even clunkier than Flash and ran worse. Flash looked nice, ran well, and was easy to install and maintain (back then it was already installed and enabled in all browsers).

Now I have lots of grey in my beard and have been working mainly on mobile tech lately. But those days -- not long before this PDF came out -- were great fun. We knew the web had to evolve and saw this type of user experience, if not this specific implementation, as the future. Today, that's AJAX and mobile apps. But Flash was a necessary stepping stone.