Comments on: MEDTING Atlas viewer

By: Ed Uthman

Ed Uthman — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 07:27:26 +0000

I’m sure that at some point in the indefinite future, Flash will be supported by iPhone, but that does little good for iPhone users now. Aside from that consideration, many serious users turn off Flash support in their browsers so as to avoid the distraction of animated Flash ads. In my opinion, Flash is predominantly a tool for commercial websites catering to customers. It’s ill used on a professional site, especially if all you’re doing is displaying static images, which any browser can do natively.
As for the images on this site, as far as I can tell, they are all low-resolution, which in my view is very cheesy and unprofessional. With the ability to display images at multiple resolutions, up to the native original resolution, Flickr is considerably more powerful than is this site. You can make images freely available on Flickr that are suitable for print publication, and you can even give them Creative Commons licenses, so people can legally download and redistribute them. Maybe Medting will find a place in private consultations, but I don’t see it ever becoming a major route for broad dissemination of educational images, at least not in its current form.

By: Enrique de la Vega

Enrique de la Vega — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 06:56:35 +0000

I do not completely agree that using flash viewer is a bad idea. Flash viewers have lots of advantages due to its nice interface and lots of usability possibilities, apart from it’s easy to put them in any Web or blog only copying a piece of code.
If the problem is how to visualize Flash pages using devices as iPhone, there are recent news that confirm that Flash is coming to the iPhone:
http://www.iphoneatlas.com/2008/09/30/adobe-official-confirms-flash-for-the-iphone-says-apple-will-decide-when/
In my opinion, because there are so many things done in Flash on the Internet these days, this is a major needed upgrade not only for the Apple products but also for other mobile devices using for example new Android operating system.

By: Ed Uthman

Ed Uthman — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 06:07:34 +0000

I think using a flash viewer is a bad idea. It’s not supported on all browsers, most notably iPod touch & iPhone. Nice concept but poorly thought-out implementation, imo.
We