Adobe’s Edge and Animate products, while having lovely interfaces, produce subpar output, as you said. JS-based animations chew up CPU faster than CSS-based ones, making these tools two years too late and thus not fit for production use. I’d recommend using Flash w/ fallback over using them if you don’t want to or are not capable of hand-coding.
Hopefully some day someone will create a program that gives you a user interface to love and output that keeps up with the rate of change. (Right now, for instance, CSS animation output with a feature detect to a jQuery animate() fallback.)
Until then, people who hand code animations will be able to reap big rewards for making things that work on iDevices. The techniques and technologies are only getting better and faster.
My prediction is that the call for web-based Flash animation will continue to shrink like Florida’s coastline under the assault of rising sea levels. However, using Flash animation to produce full-length animations like “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” will continue at its normal pace. The people at Adobe are moving Flash toward a cinematic tool and away from web production. (A Flash animated film can be embedded as a video file on a web page without needing a special plugin to play!)
In the interim, we’ll see animations being used mostly for decorative elements that look fine static as a last ditch fallback.
That said, I can’t wait to see how right or wrong I am two years from now!
Rachel Nabors
@KEV ADAMSON
Adobe’s Edge and Animate products, while having lovely interfaces, produce subpar output, as you said. JS-based animations chew up CPU faster than CSS-based ones, making these tools two years too late and thus not fit for production use. I’d recommend using Flash w/ fallback over using them if you don’t want to or are not capable of hand-coding.
Hopefully some day someone will create a program that gives you a user interface to love and output that keeps up with the rate of change. (Right now, for instance, CSS animation output with a feature detect to a jQuery animate() fallback.)
Until then, people who hand code animations will be able to reap big rewards for making things that work on iDevices. The techniques and technologies are only getting better and faster.
My prediction is that the call for web-based Flash animation will continue to shrink like Florida’s coastline under the assault of rising sea levels. However, using Flash animation to produce full-length animations like “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” will continue at its normal pace. The people at Adobe are moving Flash toward a cinematic tool and away from web production. (A Flash animated film can be embedded as a video file on a web page without needing a special plugin to play!)
In the interim, we’ll see animations being used mostly for decorative elements that look fine static as a last ditch fallback.
That said, I can’t wait to see how right or wrong I am two years from now!