Subtly

The new Macromedia site has some very interesting aspects, very subtle. The use of Flash form widgets allows for a smoother mesh between the borders of the controls and the page. It's attractive and in the case of the selects at the bottom of the homepage, they've taken advantage of this newly found control to spread the options above and below the click point, optimizing mouse travel.

The transparent slide for the intro movie is again, subtle, but effective -- allowing the user to discover it's functionality as it moves with the movie playback. Interesting, they didn't even feel compelled to put "grippies" on the moving bar. The scrollbars on subsquent pages are a touch smaller than those typicall found in iframes and well colored. On the negative side, the load movie bugs me... too jargony and reinforcing the wait as opposed to stimulating the flow.

Their design article describes the approach, touting their single page load interface to the developer exchanges. The cold fusion area in particular had just been given a window treatement in the move from allaire.com to marcromedia. The changes there, especially to a particularly sucky pagination system, which was stuck at the top of the page, are welcome. Good riddance as well to the line height issues that area suffered with Mozilla.|||
Posted at NaN:NaN, Published in: UI