Balthaser created a MONSTER

[miccox]

:Fx should offer the "weekend warriors" an easy way to make their INTROs accessible to the disabled...

- ALT text
- subtitling for speech
- content control

It would not be too much to ask to have these features built in the :Fx and encourage designers to use them. Implementing this stuff using Flash authoring tool IS too much to ask at least for the "Fxers".

I think Balthaser is responsible here.

- - - - -

And PERSONALLY, I think making business out of letting people stuff the Web with more INTROs is making Flash use even more frowned upon. We know the audience generally hates intros. It's bad reputation for the tool, and bad reputation for us, designers.

Although professionals will get more chances to bring forward the difference between a $500 intro and a $9000 website, I think there are too many ignorant marketing executives out there who take the bait and think "now we've got an eye-catching rich-media site just for $500".

-- manttila@pp.htv.fi

[darkstar]

I totally agree.
I saw the new balthaser FX site a few weeks ago on a friends cable modem and was not impressed, when i got home i tried it and... it does not work on 56k dialup as we all now know.
So, as the new breed of FX flashers get to work with their cable/asdl connections without considering line speeds/d/l time whatever, i think most 56k users will not be impressed and this imho will give flash a bad rep.
i believe most of the world is still on 56k.
some of my non programming friends have the opinion that flash is slow anyway,although I think this is just because of some preloaders and generally bad scripting.

in a nutshell i think FX will deter 56k users from flash.
including a lot of prospective buyers who may just decide to stick with html......

[agent vivid]

it's too bad balthaser will go under *imho*

the convergence of ecommerce with flash and a killer interactive database IS the future... unfortunately, the balthaser paradigm of this future is warped, and in the end, it will not be profitable and will die the dotcom death

i wonder what macromedia has to say about the entire thing... i know that as a designer, balthaser is essentially telling me that i cost too much, and that i can be replaced by drag&drop cookie-cutter crap, and that people are willing to pay for it

to macromedia, it must be like a small knife in the back... hi, i'm going to take YOUR product, use it, and then resell it in a predefined mold and totally undervalue your product, and in the end, my product will churn out lots of low-end websites which will further the anti-flash cause

ah well... se la vie

happy flashing!

[JabezStone]

Touche, Vivid!

While I commend Balthaser for their "innovation", I agree with your sentiments. I am not really militant against the company, but I do not see their product as a compliment to the interactive design community. I do not see them as a threat either, however.

Not many people know about Balthaser, and soon they won't be much of an issue anyway.

How many times have you heard of a company going out and getting an ammature website built, pay low-end for it, then later as a real designer for a re-design? VERY often! In fact, much of my business is redesigning and cleaning up after others.

Be prepared. In the near future on this board you will hear stories of clients coming to seasoned developers requesting a redesign of their hapless Balthaser CrackerJack prize.

Jabez

[agent vivid]

Originally posted by JabezStone
Be prepared. In the near future on this board you will hear stories of clients coming to seasoned developers requesting a redesign of their hapless Balthaser CrackerJack prize.

Jabez

i guess i should also say that the balthaser folks are AWESOME flashers and i totally respect what they have accomplished from a design perspective... i just don't think their concept will survive the long-haul

[JabezStone]

Originally posted by agent vivid

i guess i should also say that the balthaser folks are AWESOME flashers and i totally respect what they have accomplished from a design perspective...

True. True. Again, I echo your comments.

[Gotha]

Originally posted by JabezStone
Touche, Vivid!

While I commend Balthaser for their "innovation", I agree with your sentiments. I am not really militant against the company, but I do not see their product as a compliment to the interactive design community. I do not see them as a threat either, however.

Not many people know about Balthaser, and soon they won't be much of an issue anyway.

How many times have you heard of a company going out and getting an ammature website built, pay low-end for it, then later as a real designer for a re-design? VERY often! In fact, much of my business is redesigning and cleaning up after others.

Be prepared. In the near future on this board you will hear stories of clients coming to seasoned developers requesting a redesign of their hapless Balthaser CrackerJack prize.

Jabez

I seriously hope you're right Jabez. I haven't even seen the technology yet (only get the intro when I go to the site) but I am totally militant towards the idea of undermining the Flash community of designers by making it easy for anybody to do a Flash site. Correct me if I'm wrong but this is their goal, isn't it?

Christ, I've been living off credit cards for the last year just so I could teach myself Flash and other programs I need to learn to be a web designer and now these people come along and put out this project which makes me feel like I did this for nothing!

I want to make a living out of being a Flash designer and I've invested a lot of time into doing so. Then something like this comes around. Jesus H. Christ does this piss me off!

[Kraken]

A friend of mine sent me to the fx site saying how cool it was. Well, beyond the slick "space warp" effects behind the product description and showcase, the product itself sounds mindnumbingly bad. I do NOT want to see sites like they had in the gallery section passed off as "cutting edge" or "high-end motion graphic solutions". The future is specialization, not "one-stop-shop". The web is getting more and more sophistocated and one person, or one cut-and-paste program, does not a successful site make.

[Kraken]

Great interview. Seems like a cool guy. I still don't think cookie-cutter flash sites are going to help evangelize flash and motion sites on the web, but hey, if they're getting millions of hits and lots of people signing up, they must be doing something right.

thoughts?

[Gotha]

Originally posted by Kraken
Great interview. Seems like a cool guy. I still don't think cookie-cutter flash sites are going to help evangelize flash and motion sites on the web, but hey, if they're getting millions of hits and lots of people signing up, they must be doing something right.

thoughts?

Kraken, will you still be saying such wonderful things about this guy when you're standing in the unemployment line? I wonder...

By the way, I found a new evil called Siteblast http://www.siteblast.com -- It gives you a web site with Flash templates to work with and you only have to pay a small fee ($500 for small business) upfront. The catch is...they're all built off the same lame template...and...you also have to pay costly renewment fees every year. What a joke.

[zacvin]

All this controversy over balthaser reminds me of the industrial revelution, when machines started to replace manual labor. Back then many workers rioted, even going so far as trying to destroy the machines, with occasional success.

I think that it is natural for the masses to resist change. It is even more natural for designers to resist cookie-cutter sites and poor design. None the less, anyone can see that the trend in history has always been towards automation, away from manual labor, thus removing some jobs. Let us not forget that the computer itself is a labor-saving device. Balthaser may fall flat on its face, but sooner or later there will be others, some of which will probably be quite well designed, unlike balthaser.

Like everything on the web, time moves much faster than we anticipate. In the last ten years, the internet has gone from the stone-age, to the dark-ages, and we are fast approaching the industrial age as it seems.

Maybe one reason that we feel so intimidated by sites like balthaser is that we have put too much weight on graphics and design on the web, and not enough on content, function, and programming (sites that are more 'web applications than 'web sites').

The future is coming, and there is no stopping it. We must just find a way to work with it. We can't just set around feeling that life is not fair.

I don't believe though that these automated site creation setups will take away all need for web designer. But it is possible that they will take a large market share of low end projects. But just look at conventional design. There are tons of low priced clip-art collections all over the place, but there are still designers out there doing print and add work.

I don't believe that what balthaser is doing is wrong in any way. If they don't do it, someone will sooner or later. But I don't think that it is wrong for web designers to do what every is in their power to try to keep their prices as high as possible either.

In the end, it is survival of the fittest. I have looked at a lot of the "template" sites out there, but have to admit that although that are templates, many of them do look better than many of the low end sites that I see "custom designers" building. Thus it is no surprise that they are such worthy competition right now. If anything, I think that the future will give the top-notch designers out there more respect. It just may be very hard on the up-and-coming designers.

As a final note, I can't help but think that sites like balthaser are programmers revenge. So often designers treat programmers like they are the second best, since they are quote "not creative people". I guess it is just a good reminder that designers and programmers are equal partners on the web of today. And the programmer are laughing harder today.

Just my take.

As always, everybody sign my guest book below.

[Scills]

When Flash is your life it is natural to look upon anything new as a potential threat. I have often smiled as top Flash designers have confided that they feared the end of Flash for such and such a reason. I tend to look at :fx as an early stage prototype of a "sh*t hot" online Flash application. With the merger of of MM and Allaire I'll bet you'll start to see them leverage the backend power of Allaire's Cold Fusion (soso product) and JRun (looking better now) into Flash and other MM products. IF this happens this should enable Flash developers a much larger slice of the market as applications based in Flash will be much easier to develop and more importantly, mantain. For mine you should be hoping like hell that Balthaser succeeds.

[Lou C. Fur]

You know, in a way, I'm quite happy with all of this. When people see that they are not quite happy with what they have, thats when we come in and clean up the mess. Remember, a job is a job.

Lou C. Fur

[Kraken]

This is not the end of the web designer...just the low-end web designer. We've all got to get more technical. Can you code javascript? PHP? XML? Do you know Director and Premier and After Effects? Sure those programs cost a pretty penny, but the future is in specialization. People still pay big bucks for handcrafted wood chairs in place of industrially designed metal folding chairs. Yes, there is a need for both. Yes, there is still a living to be made in the high-end as well as the low-end...if you know what you're doing and you stay current, or ahead of the curve, with technology.

onward and upward.

[zacvin]

I just want to agree with Kraken. I think that the future is in specialization. One of the biggest challenges against one or two person shops is the fact that it is hard for them to cover all the bases. Sure, there are tons of one person shops that do design and programming, but usually they are stronger (or weaker) in one area. If all you do is low end work, that is not a problem. However, when the projects get more complicated (both design and complicated programming), it is easy to find one's self on thin ice when a new client asks "can you do such and such". Sure, if they ask if you know flash or actionscript, you can easily say yes. But most clients don't know that the much hated blinking text effect is easier than building a database driven site.

So the problem arises, you have a great client on the hook, you can do everything that they want, exept one or two things (be it programming, video, whatever). In cases like this you need a pro, someone that can do the programming or video or whatever, so you can say you can do the job, and thus (hopefully) land the client.

Some people probably think that contracting out some specialized work would result in a huge drop in profits. I don't think that it would though, at least most of the time. Even if the programming (or video) specialist cost more than your hourly rate, buy the time you buy the tools, learn the technology, then still do it 1/2 as slow, you probably are better off outsourcing the work. Plus, if you bill the client on the bill for the pro as an added outside cost, you may even be able to tack on a small markup to the price.