Following the last post I actually wanted to say more about recent FWA Site of the Month awards.

A year ago or so browsing recent submissions and SOTD winners I started comparing them with oldschool sites. The ones from 2000-2004. It looked like to win an FWA you needed a lot of video and 3d. Nobody cares how much a site “weighs” these days. I remember how we invented different tricks to overcome numerous limitations, how we coded realtime effects and used vector animation. Today whoever has more videos and prerendered 3d wins.

I remember we had preloaders, people waited minutes(!) while the site was loading. I remember I made a 6Mb site and had to listen to people complaining that it was too big. Many visitors failed to wait that long for the site to load. Now let’s check FWA Site of the Month winners once again. Initial size is the size in megabytes of whatever had to be loaded before I could proceed. Total size is how much megabytes the site downloaded while I was browsing it a bit. I tried not to view videos and other media content (on sites which are not interactive videos by design).

• January, Lego Star Wars — initial: 8.53Mb, total: 34.6Mb. I liked this one. Good art, animations and navigation.
• February, Die Hipster — initial: 31.21Mb, total: 33Mb. Didn’t get what to do so I closed the game. Looks like it preloaded almost everything just to start.
• March, Greenpeace – A New Warrior —initial: 28.75Mb, total: 41.45Mb. Good site, but the video during loading and total 28.75Mb of data just to show main interface is disturbing.
• April, Wall of Fame —  initial: 15.06Mb, total: 126Mb. What the hell do they have in these 15 megabytes? But at least they got it right and don’t load the whole map at once.
• May, Pleasure Hunt — initial: 43.69Mb, total: 43.69Mb. This site just has to be fully preloaded because it’s a straight forward experience. But 43 megabytes…
• June, 3 Dreams of Black — initial: 43.49Mb, total: 73.85Mb. This one might be a great WebGL demo (as in demoscene) but 73 megabytes is nowhere near.
• July, The Museum of Me — initial: 46.11Mb, total: 61.5Mb. All right, a dynamic video has to be big.
• August, Sexy Fingers — initial: -Mb, total: -Mb. This is total sh*t and doesn’t load on my PC. I blame Flashblock.
• September, The Planet Zero — initial: 2.19Mb, total: 5.75Mb. Now THIS is an oldschool site. It’s really great! Checked every corner of the tiny little planet and only 6 megabytes downloaded.
• October, Being Henry — initial: 20.05Mb, total: 214Mb. Allright, that’s what I was talking about. Just make a huge video and win a SOTM award. But I actually liked it.
• November, The Honda Experiment — initial: 4.44Mb, total: 9.56Mb. I don’t get it. The idea with multi-windowed interface was around since 2000. Everyone hated it because of the reflex to close small pop-up windows.
• December, Androp Bell — initial: 41.98Mb, total: 46.48Mb. An interactive music game, I wonder how long I would have to wait with my 256kbit connection.

Updated my good old FWA Winner from 2007. God, I can’t believe I wrote that code o.O !!1

Who would expect it to be so hard to find a good ActionScript 2 (yes, ActionScript TWO) developer these days. Our company’s main project is a big flash MMO written in AS2 long time ago. It is still popular and brings a lot of money. But people come and go, so live team department is looking for an AS2 programmer without success so far.

There’re just no AS2 developers left. And that’s obvious why. You either go mainstream (if you are decent) and learn AS3 or work for a company coding banners in frame scripts (if you are bad or don’t want to learn). Nobody stays long (if at all) in AS2 world these days. As it has been so far, people who claim to know AS2 are just bad. They don’t know AS2, they know just a bit of programming. No OOP or design patterns. I’m not saying that AS2 can be tricky sometimes and you have to be good to support a large-scale project.

Personally, I should not mention AS2 knowledge in my resume because I totally forgot it. And don’t really want to return back to those days. But if offered 2x payment raise I’d think about it.