Internet Outlook with Richard Wiggins | 29

Do Spinning Globes Yield Superior Sites?

The Flash Experience

The site in question is gabocorp.com. The principal developer is Gabo Mendoza, whose company is based in Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico. Macromedia picked them as a site of the day on January 21, guaranteeing a substantial viewership. Although I'll attempt to describe the site, you really need to experience it firsthand to get a feeling for its style.

Unfortunately, trying the site out means having a working browser and working Macromedia Flash plugin. After a colleague demonstrated the site for me, I resolved to try it out on my PC at home. Unfortunately, no amount of fiddling and reinstalling Macromedia Flash (or even the entire Shockwave plugin) would coax Netscape 4.04 on my PC to play the Gabo site. The front page suggests Netscape 4.0 is best (yup, been there, done that) and kindly states "If you don't see the animation, click Help." Help advised me that I must not have the plugin installed. Grrrr, yes I do have it installed, and it is Netscape 4.0; I don't know why your site won't load properly!

So, I decided it was time to finally install Internet Explorer 4.0 at home. Thank goodness for the cable modem; the 21 megabytes for the full download took only a few minutes instead of hours. A little more finagling and a reboot or two, and we were ready to play.

IE had no trouble rendering Gabo's site. And even on my modest PC (modest CPU - a 90 megahertz Pentium - but plenty of RAM at 48 megabytes) the effects are stunning. Photo realistic spheres dance smoothly across the screen. Logo elements appear, zoom in and out, and rotate equally smoothly. Mellifluous music accompanies each screen experience. (Alas, the Macromedia site slaps their hand, saying "It is quite unfortunate, however, that these creative people felt the need to rip off the sounds from the soundtrack for Akira...") Finally, a simple arc of spheres appears across the screen, offering a menu of simple choices: "Our goal" or "Our Work" or "Our Prices" and so forth.

Click on a menu choice, and spheres and graphics zoom away to make room for bits of content.

It's all done in the spirit of numerous other Flash implementations, and those folks who've spent some time exploring Flash-enabled universes probably won't find it revolutionary. To some, though, this site seems to carry things to a new level of coolness. I urge you to check it out for yourself. The question is, will it play in Peoria?