 News and views on the world of interactive media.Announcing CreateJSPosted on March 16, 2012 by Grant Skinner, 25 Comments We’ve been working really hard on a lot of great stuff over the last couple months, and I’m thrilled finally to be able to share it with the world. CreateJSWe’re going to be releasing EaselJS and a number of companion libraries under the new umbrella name “CreateJS”. CreateJS will be a suite of modular libraries and tools which work together to enable rich interactive content on open web technologies (aka HTML5). These libraries will be designed so that they can work completely independently, or you can mix and match as suits your needs. The initial offerings will be: EaselJS, TweenJS, SoundJS, and PreloadJS. Along with the new name, we’ll also be launching a new site at createjs.com which will consolidate demos, docs, tutorials, community, and showcases for all of the libraries and tools. If you have a project or tutorial you’d like to see featured, tweet it to us: @createjs. EaselJSEaselJS provides a display list and interactive model for working with rich graphics on top of the HTML5 canvas (and beyond). It provides an API that is familiar to Flash developers, but embraces javascript sensibilities. We’re planning a minor v0.4.1 release soon, which includes bug fixes and some minor feature additions. Following that, work will commence on v0.5, which will focus on some larger features, API clean up and consistency, and improved documentation. If you have features you’d like to see in v0.5, add them to the issue list, or tweet them to @createjs, and we’ll see what we can do. Along with the CreateJS site launch, we will be releasing much improved examples, and links to resources and tutorials developed by the community. Again, let us know if you’ve written a tutorial, or have something cool you’ve built with EaselJS you’d like us to showcase. TweenJSTweenJS is a tweening and animation library that works with EaselJS or independently. It offers a deceptively simple interface, and a huge amount of power with support for delays, easing, callbacks, non-numeric properties, sequencing, and plugins. TweenJS v0.2 will be tagged soon. It will incorporate some fixes and tweaks, along with a full plugin model. After v0.2 our next focus will be on performance and providing better demos and documentation in preparation for the CreateJS launch. SoundJSAudio is currently a mess in HTML5, but SoundJS works to abstract away the problems and makes adding sound to your games or rich experiences much easier. We have a huge v0.2 release in testing right now. It is a ground up rewrite that incorporates a target plugin model that allows you to prioritize what APIs you’d like to use to play audio. For example, you could choose to prioritize WebAudio, then audio tags, then Flash audio. You can query for capabilities (depending on the plugin that is used), and it offers seamless progressive enhancement (for example, panning will work in WebAudio, but will be quietly ignored in HTML audio). Following v0.2 our focus will move to fixing bugs, and delivering plugins for mobile and application platforms like PhoneGap and Win8 Metro for a v0.2.1 release. PreloadJSThe newest addition to the suite, PreloadJS will make it easy to preload your assets: images, sounds, JS, data, or others. It will use XHR2 to provide real progress information when available, or fall back to tag loading and eased progress when it isn’t. It allows multiple queues, multiple connections, pausing queues, and a lot more. We’re hoping to get a v0.1 build out in the next couple weeks for people to start playing with, and then will focus on fixing bugs, improving documentation, and just generally maturing things for v0.1.1. ZoëZoë is an open source AIR application that converts SWF animations to sprite sheets. It supports some advanced features, like configurable frame reuse and multi-image sheets (important for mobile). For Zoë v0.2 we’re planning to add support for reading the symbols in a SWF, and letting you select multiple symbols to include in your exported sprite sheet. It’s also worth mentioning here that Flash Pro CS6 will include direct support for exporting sprite sheets for EaselJS, offering a more integrated workflow than Zoë can provide. Toolkit for CreateJSWe’ve partnered with Adobe to build a fantastic tool for leveraging all of the existing Flash Pro skill that’s out there to build amazing HTML5 experiences. The Toolkit for CreateJS is an extension for Flash Pro that allows you to publish content (including symbols, vectors, animations, bitmaps, sound, and text) for CreateJS & HTML5 as a library of scriptable, instantiable objects. We’ve worked really hard to develop a workflow that makes sense, and to generate code that is completely human readable, and very small (in some cases the output is smaller than SWF when zlib compressed). You can even write JS code on the Flash timeline, and it will be injected into your published tweens. Exciting times! If you’d like to stay on top of CreateJS updates, please follow @createjs on Twitter. Disable Local Security Errors in ChromePosted on March 4, 2012 by Grant Skinner, 5 Comments I’m blogging this mainly for my own benefit, so I can look it up easily whenever I need to: If you’d like to disable security errors generated from accessing local content in Chrome (ex. reading pixels from a local image), just launch it with the “–disable-web-security” param. So on OSX, you’d type this into Terminal: open -a Google\ Chrome –args –disable-web-security It lasts until you close Chrome. Handy for testing EaselJS content on your local file system. The Evolution of (Web) Development ToolsPosted on January 19, 2012 by Grant Skinner, 11 Comments I’ve seen a few people complaining about and/or questioning the lack of mature tools to develop content for the modern web (aka HTML5), and it got me thinking about the evolution of these tools, and how challenges are solved for technology platforms in general. In my (albeit limited) experience, there is a natural progression for a maturing technology stack, particularly one without a single master (ex. Flash and iOS development differ somewhat because the tools and platform are directed/developed by the same entity). First, you will see the development of a lot of frameworks, starting with micro-libraries that address a single challenge, and evolving to macro-frameworks like JQuery that tackle an entire workflow. Developing frameworks has a very low barrier to entry, and provides an ideal way for developers to explore and share a variety of potential solutions for challenges. Because the libraries are written in the domain language, it also means that any developer encountering a problem can address it directly with a language they are familiar with. As problems become better defined, and specific solutions begin to emerge as more dominant, you start to see single purpose tools created, often as command-line utilities. These have an increased investment compared to frameworks, and require that the developer has knowledge of both the problem domain, and basic desktop development. Next, you will see partial workflow tools, which aggregate and leverage the single purpose tools (either directly, or by borrowing approaches). These put a UI on top of a number of solutions to make them more accessible to users. Again, these involve increased investment, and require additional capability (UX/UI design, more advanced desktop development). Finally, you will see the emergence of full-scale workflow tools. These represent a major investment, generally require a team of specialists to create, and are built over the course of months or years. As such, they need to build on top of standards, approaches, and frameworks that have been well vetted by real-world use. Even then, their early releases will be limited, and will require a huge amount of community feedback and multiple revisions to “get it right”. With this in mind, early release with rapid iteration is a critical practice for any tool that aims to be successful in this space. As an aside, code editors tend to follow an accelerated path, simply because the problems they are solving are less tied to a specific technology platform, and have been thoroughly explored for other languages. Of course, none of these steps happen in isolation. In the JS world, you can see all of these underway simultaneously. There is an unending stream of new frameworks, as developers explore challenges, with a number of more mature ones gaining traction. There are a number of popular single-purpose tools (ex. LESS, Closure Compiler, Zoë). There are a few partial workflow tools (ex. CodeKit). And finally, there are a number of early entries in the more robust tool category (Edge, Sencha Animator, Flash Pro’s Wallaby, etc). Further, this evolution is massively complicated and slowed in the HTML/JS world by the constant flux of the technology, the non-trivial issue of supporting multiple browsers/platforms, and the question of legacy support. Tool makers need to wait for a standard (or more frequently, a collection of standards) to stabilize and be broadly adopted/accepted before they can risk the investment to build on top of it. This is obviously a simplified look at the problem, but hopefully helps illustrate where things are today, and why we don’t have access to fully mature tools for HTML5 development yet. They are coming, but it’s going to be an incremental process. Updates to EaselJS, SoundJS, TweenJS & Zoë!Posted on November 30, 2011 by Grant Skinner, 12 Comments I’m very happy to announce that I’ve pushed major updates to a number of our javascript tools and libraries for developing rich content with HTML5. It’s very exciting for me to see these starting to realize some of the vision I’ve had for them over the past year, both as individual pieces and as a suite of tools to make great interactive content using web standards. Here’s a quick breakdown of what was released: EaselJS v0.4.0 We’ve added filter effects, and a few sample filters, including a box blur filter by Mario Klingemann, who has agreed to write a number of other filters for the library. There’s also a fantastic new build system, built on top of Node.js by Adobe’s own Mike Chambers. And, of course, a whole pile of other feature additions, optimizations and bug fixes. Check the VERSIONS file for full details. Zoë v1.5.0 This release was a bit more rushed than we would have liked, so you should expect to see a v1.5.1 release before too long that polishes things up and adds additional features such as multi-image export. TweenJS v0.1.0 SoundJS v0.1.0 This library is still a little rough, but we’re planning to continue to clean it up and add functionality (ex. WebAudio support) as time permits. in summary As an aside, now that these releases are out of the way, I’m considering doing a series of posts or videos on getting started with some of these libraries. I think it would be particularly relevant as Flash developers start looking to create content in HTML5, and web developers look to create more interactive content. Flash Player Mobile, a Post Mortem.Posted on November 9, 2011 by Grant Skinner, 88 Comments By now, you’ve likely heard that Adobe has ceased development of the Flash Player for mobile browsers. It’s hard to miss – it has whipped the usual rabble of ill-informed techno-zealots into a screaming mass of vindictive idiocy. Sadly, this frenzy is being led by sensational headlines in the media, and snarky, self-congratulatory posts by leading tech pundits. I don’t think I will ever understand the joy that apparently comes from dancing on the grave of a dead technology. One less technology means one less choice, and one less branch from which new innovation can spring. And let’s be honest. A LOT of innovation has sprung from Flash. It opened a whole new class of web experience, birthed online casual gaming, defined rich UI, and heavily influenced many of the features that comprise HTML5. Yes, Flash is proprietary, but that allows it to be agile. Yes, there’s an abundance of truly horrible Flash content out there, but that’s more a testament to its ease of use than its failings as a technology. I guarantee that if creating HTML5 content ever becomes as simple as with Flash, you will see a plethora of horrible HTML5 content (though hopefully some lessons will not be forgotten – RIP Skip Intro). Flash is deeply flawed, but so is every technology. Hating it is popular, but seems to be based less on any rational analysis, and more on a self-sustaining anti-fanboism, and the sheep-like re-bleating of Jobs’ proclamations. See, Steve Jobs was right. But then he was wrong. Very wrong. As an iPhone user, I was initially in full agreement that Flash had no place on my phone. Flash Lite was crap, and there was no evidence that the full player could be made to run well on a device. I also didn’t have a burning need to view Flash content on my phone. Then two things happened that shifted my thinking. First, Adobe (eventually) proved that the Player could be viable on mobile with the Android plugin. They also made it optional. In my mind, that was ideal. It gave people a choice. I could choose not to enable Flash, or I could choose to only enable SWFs that I wanted to view. It seemed like the perfect compromise, and made me wish I had the same choice in iOS. Unfortunately, Steve wasn’t known for compromise, so rather than either embrace this proven approach or simply maintain the status quo, he chose to lash out. His famous open letter on Flash was a mix of half-truths, hypocritical misdirection, and outright lies. I lost a lot of respect for Mr. Jobs that day. Withholding a choice from users to maintain a “perfect vision” is classic Jobs, but engaging in FUD wasn’t. His biography indicates that this act was driven not by evaluating what was best for users, but rather by a personal vendetta against Adobe for past slights. Regardless of his motive, it worked incredibly well. Companies cancelled or froze Flash projects while they waited for the dust to settle. Flash lost a ton of momentum, despite there being no viable replacement yet. Without iOS, Flash’s “write once, deploy anywhere” story became a lot weaker. Given this climate, I think Adobe made the right choice in killing off mobile Flash. The mobile player requires a huge ongoing investment to support new devices and OSes, an investment that has no (obvious) financial benefit for Adobe. Further, the type of content that Flash enables doesn’t make a ton of sense on the mobile web. People use their browsers for quick look-ups and fall back to apps for rich content. This will change over time, but the reality is that virtually no one is creating mobile version of Flash content for the web, there simply wasn’t enough demand to justify the expense, especially without iOS support. If this decision allows Adobe to focus on increasing innovation in the desktop player, significantly improving their app packagers, and investing heavily in HTML5 tooling, it’s got my vote. Jobs was right, but he was right for the wrong reasons. Great Pumpkin Showdown 2011 ResultsPosted on November 8, 2011 by Lanny McNie, No Comments I am proud to announce the winner of this year’s pumpkin contest! “Kill All Pumpkins”, Ryan and Lanny’s homage to Futurama brings home the gold, narrowly edging out Grant and Wes’ “2001, a Squash Odyssey”, and “The Angry Pumpkin” by Sebastian and Chris, which kept up until the last few days of the race. There were some great entries this year, and I think it was one of the best contests yet. Thanks to everyone that voted!
JSFL #include & classes.Posted on November 7, 2011 by Grant Skinner, 9 Comments I’ve been doing a lot of work with JSFL the last little while, and was starting to get frustrated with the inability to define my classes and methods in separate files. I did some hunting around, and found a couple of solutions that worked by putting objects in an implicit global scope, but this doesn’t seem to work in CS5. After some messing around, I came up with an approach that seems to be working: In MyClass.jsfl MyClass = function() {} var p = MyClass.prototype; p.run = function() { fl.trace("hello!"); } in main.jsfl: var JSFL_PATH = fl.configURI+"path/to/jsfls/"; var included = {}; function include(file) { if (included[file]) { return; } included[file] = true; eval(FLfile.read(JSFL_PATH+file+".jsfl")); } include("MyClass"); var foo = new MyClass(); foo.run(); The Great Pumpkin Showdown VIIPosted on October 31, 2011 by Lanny McNie, 2 Comments Maybe we are compensating for missing halloween last year, but 2011 is our greatest pumpkin contest yet! On Friday, fuelled by beer and pumpkin ale, we split into teams and commenced the hack-and-slash carve-fest. Cast your vote, leave some comments, and go check out the previous years’ pumpkins! Media Keys In OSX For Any KeyboardPosted on October 26, 2011 by Grant Skinner, 7 Comments I recently bought a shiny new mechanical keyboard to use with my Mac. So far, I’m liking it, but I miss having media keys for controlling volume and music playback like on my Apple & Logitech keyboards. To address this, I wrote a few simple Applescript services that you can bind keyboard shortcuts to, which enable media commands (volume up/down, mute, play/pause, and next/prev track) for any keyboard. You can download them by clicking here. Once downloaded and unzipped, simply double click each workflow file to install it. Note that these are only tested in OSX 10.7 Lion. To bind keyboard shortcuts to the scripts, go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts. Select Services in the left panel, then scroll down to the script you want to assign a shortcut to. Double click on the right side of the row to edit the shortcut. Now, just hit the key combination you want to use, and make sure the checkbox to the left is checked (it likes to uncheck when you edit the key combo).
I used the following shortcuts: Command + Option +: Command + Control +: I chose these because they are conveniently grouped at the top right of my keyboard, and I don’t use them for anything else. Note that you seem to need to include a Command in your key combo for it to work everywhere. Also note that I made the system volume control fairly granular (5% increments), and the iTunes control fairly coarse (20% increments) based on my personal preference. You can easily edit these values by opening the workflow files in Automator. The scripts can be found at ~/Library/Services/ once installed. 8 Years, a Retrospective.Posted on September 29, 2011 by Grant Skinner, 10 Comments I was looking at the blog today, thinking how neglected it is, when I realized that its 8 year anniversary had recently passed. That got me scanning nostalgically through old posts, and wistfully pondering how much has changed since my very first post on Sept 1, 2003. At the time, I was a spiky-haired, fresh-faced, freelance developer who had just recently won my first few awards, and had spoken at my first few conferences (a thoroughly nerve-racking experience). I was completely unsure of my place in the industry, had no idea how to promote myself (though I was starting to learn), and wasn’t sure what I wanted to be when I “grew up”. I just knew that I REALLY loved building cool things in Flash. Eight years later, a lot has changed, but the important parts have stayed the same. I’m a grizzled veteran, with more than a few white hairs, and am no longer so fresh of face. I’ve spoken at hundreds of conferences and events around the world, but I still get completely stressed out before every single one. I lead a team of 14 absolutely amazing developers and designers, working on cutting-edge projects for some of the biggest brands in the world, but I’m still not sure what I want to be when I grow up. I just know that I still REALLY love building cool things and sharing them with the world. There are a few reasons why I still love my work so much. Foremost, I love the continuous challenge and the sense of creation. I don’t think I’ve had a day in the past 8yrs when I haven’t either learned something new, or built something (however small) that I can be proud of. I also appreciate the diversity – I’m sure I’d be a much wealthier man if my company focused on building “enterprise blah blah blahs for the yadda yadda market vertical”, but I much prefer constantly tackling new challenges. We’ve worked on everything from intros & micro sites to frameworks & enterprise apps to games & installations to technical demos & art pieces. I also really appreciate the people. My own little team is made up of intelligent, creative, and fun people that I genuinely love working with. Our clients tend to be smart, savvy, and eager to do fantastic, progressive work. And, the communities I’ve been honoured to participate in have been hugely supportive and giving. Seriously, the Flash community is one of the coolest groups of like-minded folk I’ve ever had the pleasure to interact (and party) with. I’m still getting to know the HTML/JS community, but I’m hoping they will be equally cool. I know it’s a bit sappy and cliché, but I have a deep passion and love for what I do, and a great deal of respect for the people I’ve been privileged to work with over the past decade. I’d like to think that’s helped make my work better, but if not, at least I’ve been having fun the whole time! (and, yes, I will try to post more often – Twitter and G+ have made me lazy) |
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