Flash matures

If you happen to peruse this week’s edition of Network World you’ll see a story by yours truly entitled “Flash: More than just glitzy Web sites” talking about how companies are using Flash for actual business rather than just productivity-sapping games. Macromedia has been pushing business and data-driven applications with the release of Flash MX 2004, so I figured I’d hunt down a few to see if this was the case. Turns out, there are some companies that are using the technology to sell products and access data in a graphical manner. One company that didn’t make it into the print story is Polaroid. It is using Flash to spruce up its static Web site, including this nifty application that lets a consumer figure out what film they need for their Polaroid camera and links to buy it.