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by cnp 4915 days ago
My first thought: Nice, well done, very clean, but compared to the stuff that was being done in Flash in 2001, the bar has been lowered so substantially it's as though Flash had never existed and no one has learned anything. The Anti-Flash bias tears down memory quite easily.

But since we ARE dealing with a JavaScript and CSS3 world....

I'm really impressed with what's being done here and the possibilities that it will bring forth:

http://radiapp.com/ (this looks very promising)

http://www.greensock.com/gsap-js/

http://www.greensock.com/css3/

http://www.greensock.com/js/speed.html

The performance is so good! Check out the Mountain Dew site to see it in action: http://mountaindew.com/

(You can tell the developers who worked on the site used to be Flash Developers; it has that sort of polished flair.)

Also this: http://www.createjs.com/#!/CreateJS

And a bit of self promotion, built for the above: https://github.com/damassi/Backbone.Create

3 comments

Sarcasm? These sites perform terrible on even modern systems. Worst offenders usually involve any kind of scrolling.

It's the anti-moore: while smart people at Intel shrink transistors, these people build virtual machines on virtual machines to keep multiplying the constants in Big O.

I agree that Flash not the way to go anymore. I'm just saying that there was once an interactive "bar", and that bar has been obliterated and forgotten and now we're playing catch-up. It's exiciting and interesting, all over again, and there's something to be said about that. (But it's also fun to reminisce about how badass flash once was (check out the http://thefwa.com/ archives going wayyyy back), and still is: skrillexquest.com)

These simple, linear CSS3 transitions just don't do it for me, having once experienced that. But again, it will get there in time.

I totally agree with the flash analogy. All the bouncing balls and fancy pattern animations shown as "cutting edge css animations" have already been done with flash in 1999. History repeating? I use css3, js, canvas, sometimes mic and camera via js and other open technologies all day during my work but too often I get reminded of my time as a flasher- on a much harder way.

Anyway I love these days. Finally flasher and non-flasher are now in a single boat towards the future.

CreateJS in many ways seems to bring Flash/ActionScript concepts to JavaScript. I used EaselJS and PreloadJS in my Win 8 project, and in a lot of ways it felt like I was back in ActionScript (except for worrying about which page on the timeline - for better or worse).
Agreed. What impresses me most about the CreateJS suite is the ease in which you can use and interact with sprite-sheets. That's the one thing that I feel has been missing from most of the newer open-source drawing / animation libs coming out for HTML5, and really sent me back to the days when I was first learning how to animate in Flash and the joy of seeing it 'simply work' in the browser without much development time.

Easy to use, performant, JSON based, and thus interoperable with many pre-existing tools. I hope it catches on.