alt Hacker NewsI’m sorry I can’t hear you over the Flash animation splash pages I was forced to sit through before being able to look up hours of operation.
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I did some work for a company that spent nearly a grand on a Flash animation for their title page of a red bouncing ball that would bounce from right to left along the letters of the word "Yipee" (yeah totally not ripping off Yahoo! were they?) until it landed in the crook of the Y, where it would spread down the middle - the finished logo had the Y made out of blue, yellow, and red stripes.
Every single person I showed it to including my then-70-something mother said "that just looks like menstrual bleeding".
Every single person said that.
They still went with it. Conversion rate? Dunno, never got numbers high enough to test the script.
As a teenager I remember going to a website for... a city, I think? And their 'sidebar' was a Java applet that did nothing but provide links for you to click with on-hover effects. The page used frames; the applet was in the left-side frame and the content was in the main frame on the right.
The applet took 30 seconds to load. Once it loaded, it showed five buttons to click to get to different sections of the site. When you clicked on one, instead of changing the content frame, it sent you to an entirely new frameset. This, of course, caused the sidebar to take another 30 seconds to load. Hitting the back button did the same thing.
Meanwhile, I knew someone whose friend made a little applet that he showed me; it was a Java applet that you could provide an image URL for and it would load the image and then, below the image, show a rippling effect as though you were looking at something on the shore of a rippling lake. This applet took less than a second to load and ran incredibly smoothly.
Java was a curse, not because Java was bad but because Java applets were written badly and used badly simply because they were neat.