I've been developing for the web since 1994, and in that time I've seen technologies come and go. Some have been truly bad ideas from the start (like the blink tag). Others filled a genuine need (like Flash). Back in the mid-nineties, I dabbled a lot with Macromedia Director. I spent countless hours building a thing I called the ColourZoomer, which loaded an image and then let you interactively change the colours, zoom and crop it. I learned a lot about OO programming doing that. I also built an application called "The Alchemist", which was like a ColourZoomer on steroids. It let you load images...