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Hype: A Worthy Flash Alternative

2012-02-04 01:00
Hype, by developers Tumult, seems to have a rather appropriate title. There has been a great deal of talk about this web animation app since its release some months ago, and that can hardly be a surprise, given that it claims to allow the user to create beautiful HTML5 web content and animations with no coding required, and that it is developed by a pair of ex-Apple engineers. Does it deliver on its promises, or does this app get too much hype for its own good The state of animation on the web Lets be honest: unless you have been living under a rock for the past 15 years (in which case it would be surprising to find you reading this), you will know very well that Flash has been the tool of choice for most animation on the web up until relatively recently. For over a decade now it has been (and continues to be in many cases) the de-facto standard for animated content on the web. The reasons for this are many, including the wide install-base of the Flash browser plugin, and the fast that Flash as a platform has a relatively low barrier to entry, (it is possible to learn the basics very quickly for most people), and is very flexible (you can build everything from a simple button up to full, interactive, websites). It is only within the past year or two that CSS3 has reached a stage where browser vendors have been interested in starting to support the burgeoning standard, and even now support is far from universal. The latest builds of Safari and Chrome carry the best support, with Firefox and Opera shortly behind. IE9 has added some CSS3 support, but any version prior to that will see no love for your animated creations. CSS3 brings with it the possibility of animating elements individually using nothing but the same kind of code web developers generate daily anyway (albeit with some new syntax to learn), and these animations will work on iOS devices such as the iPad and iPhone while Flash, famously, will not. Javascript also has a part to play in this equation, too. It is possible to leverage Javascript 8217;s control over the page to animate elements, but for most people the code needed to do this is simply too arduous to write. jQuery makes things a great deal easier by including a framework that you can build around (basically allowing you to set end values for CSS attributes such as position or opacity and doing all the work in-between for you). Up steps Hype The main problem with the use of CSS3 and/or Javascript to achieve your animation goals, though, is that you have to know (and write) a lot of code if you are hoping to achieve anything but the most simple of animations. Secondly, the lack of an immediate visual representation of what you are doing will make this a difficult approach for many people. For example, you might want to move an image from point a, to point b. Point a is easy - that is probably where the image starts, but where is point b How many pixels do you need to move it to get it in just the right place This is where Hy...
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