In Flagrante Delicto! » HTML5

Adobe Edge Preview 4 – Playback Actions

Joseph Labrecque — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:54:45 +0000

Adobe Edge is a new motion and interactivity tool from Adobe which can output rich, interactive compositions using standard web technologies like HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. I’ve recorded a small set of videos demonstrating some of the new features of Adobe Edge Preview 4 and present them here.

Joseph Labrecque demonstrates how to use Adobe Edge Preview 4 to create Symbol Playback Actions within an Edge composition timeline.

Download Adobe Edge Preview 4 from Adobe Labs.

Adobe Edge Preview 4 – Using Symbols

Joseph Labrecque — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:54:10 +0000

Joseph Labrecque demonstrates how to use Adobe Edge Preview 4 to create Symbols within an Edge composition.

Download Adobe Edge Preview 4 from Adobe Labs.

Adobe Edge Preview 4 – Using Web Fonts

Joseph Labrecque — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:51:20 +0000

Joseph Labrecque demonstrates how to use Adobe Edge Preview 4 to create text elements which use custom web fonts in an Edge composition.

Download Adobe Edge Preview 4 from Adobe Labs.

Adobe Edge Preview 4 – Embedding a Composition

Joseph Labrecque — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:50:13 +0000

Joseph Labrecque demonstrates how to embed a composition created with Adobe Edge Preview 4 into an existing web page design.

Download Adobe Edge Preview 4 from Adobe Labs.

Forthcoming Book: Learning Adobe Edge

Joseph Labrecque — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:41:26 +0000

Happy to make known the fact that my forthcoming book with Packt has been officially announced: Learning Adobe Edge!

My editor and I actually began talking about this book while I was still in the process of writing Flash Development for Android Cookbook. This was right after the “EDGE Prototype” was shown at the Adobe MAX 2010 conference. I thought it was an interesting concept, at the time, but wasn’t personally hyped up around it at all. It was simply a conceptual prototype – not a real product… and I didn’t see an immediate need for a tool like that anyhow.

How things change over the span of a year! Since MAX 2010, I’ve been using early builds of the software and have honestly been so impressed with the team behind Edge and what they’ve been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time. It’s really quite amazing what can be done with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript if you have the right tooling. With each new build of Edge released on Adobe Labs, we gain more power through the application and the runtime behind it – all of this atop a constantly improving user experience. I’m also thrilled that the product that is so fun to use!

Adobe Edge is a solid application – I’m half way through what is turning out to be a solid book. It’s my hope that readers agree on both points.

The book will be out this Summer – in the meantime, we’ve come up with a small quickstart guide book (~100pp) which focuses on the Adobe Edge Preview and that should become available in the next couple of weeks!

(Special thanks to Christer Kaitila, author of the Adobe Flash 11 Stage3D (Molehill) Game Programming Beginner’s Guide, for taking some time to tech review the quickstart guide.)

Learning Adobe Edge

Create engaging motion and rich interactivity with Adobe Edge

Author: Joseph Labrecque
Publisher: Packt Publishing (~July 2012)
ISBN-10: 1849692424
ISBN-13: 978-1-84969-242-7
Pages: ~300

Learning Adobe Edge will detail how to use this professional authoring software to create highly engaging content which targets HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. Content created in Adobe Edge does not rely on a plugin – so it can be run within any standard browser– even on mobile.

With the advent of HTML5 and CSS3, web designers can now create sophisticated animations without the need of additional plugins such as Flash. However, there hasn’t been an easy way for creating animations with web standards until now. This book enables even those with little knowledge of HTML or programming web content to freely create a variety of rich compositions involving motion and interactivity.

Adobe Has a New “Design and Web” Blog!

Joseph Labrecque — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:27:17 +0000

Great new resource from Adobe showing off some future products, services, and workflows that Creative Suite engineers are working on:

Design and Web

News and views from Paul and Lea. Paul Gubbay is Sr. Director Engineering and Lea Hickman is Sr. Director Product Management for the Creative Suite Design and Web Tools, Suites and Services.

Here’s a video demo of “Canvas for Designers” which shows the rendering of FXG within an HTML5 Canvas element:

Check out all the articles at http://blogs.adobe.com/designandweb/.

Just To Put Things In Perspective…

Joseph Labrecque — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:48:30 +0000

Ever since Apple announced their new iPad, I’ve been reading a whole lot about how HTML5 will replace (I believe “kill” is the preferred term) Flash. Most arguments state that the emerging HTML5 spec includes such things as

I did a little research. HTML5 has the following new features (proposed, mind you) that share some similarity with what Flash can do:

Audio Playback -> Flash 4 [1999]
Video Playback -> Flash MX [2002]
Canvas (2D Drawing) -> Flash 1 [1996](Timeline) / Flash MX [2002](API)
Offline Storage -> Flash MX [2002] (Local Shared Objects)

So… far as I can tell, HTML5 will share some capabilities with Flash MX circa 2002.

Understand that I’m not trying to in any way bash HTML5 here. I remember when I was first learning HTML and the frustration I had upon the realization that there was no video or audio tag to simply playback a piece of media. I welcome such innovations and truly hope that after the video codec battle and other disputes are over that we have a truly ubiquitous solution for marking up text and media content for the Web.

In fact, I do a lot of development in HTML/CSS/JavaScript currently and would love to be able to use some of the innovations presented in the HTML5 spec along with some of the CSS3 elements I’m adding into my work. Yeah, my main deal is Flash/Flex/AIR – but that’s the thing; these technologies work well together; they complement/complete one another. It would be absurd for me to state that I want HTML to “die” — just as absurd as it is for others to say the same regarding Flash.

So I have no opposition whatsoever for HTML to evolve and mature as the Web itself grows richer in data and presentation- but Flash is not HTML and HTML is not Flash. I know this is nothing new to a lot of you but apparently a lot of others have trouble with this concept. For a simple example: Flash has some trouble rendering any HTML but for the simplest tags. Do I fault Flash for this? No! HTML for years has not been able to render native video or provide any of the rich application experiences that the Flash Platform enables. Do I fault HTML for this? Equally, no! The purpose of Flash is not to render or replace HTML in what it does best and the purpose of HTML5 should not be to replace Flash in all that it is capable of.

Let’s look some basic facts. HTML 4.01 was finalized and published in December of 1999. At this time, Flash was at version 4 which included the capability to do much of what is now proposed in draft form for HTML5. When will HTML5 be finalized? The editor of HTML5 specification, Ian Hickson of Google, outlines the timeline as such:

First W3C Working Draft in October 2007.
Last Call Working Draft in October 2009.
Call for contributions for the test suite in 2011.
Candidate Recommendation in 2012.
First draft of test suite in 2012.
Second draft of test suite in 2015.
Final version of test suite in 2019.
Reissued Last Call Working Draft in 2020.
Proposed Recommendation in 2022.

2022. I kid you not.

Granted, much of the spec is considered stable and certain items can be used in web browsers today. Just as with the browser wars of the late 1990′s there are many different interpretations and implementations of the specs with multiple vendors all vying for their specific interpretation to emerge as dominant. History does repeat itself, doesn’t it?

Think on this… if HTML5 is going to be a work in progress until 2022… where will Flash, Sliverlight, Unity, and others be at this time? Given the present release cycle for Flash Player, one could assume that 2022 will see the release of Flash Player 17 or so, if Flash is even still a viable platform at that time.

Food for thought.

HTML5 and the Flash Platform – A Call for Sanity

Joseph Labrecque — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:08:30 +0000

A strange thing has been happening over the past year or so. It has become quite fashionable amoung open source advocates, social media “experts”, and HTML5 zealots to talk down Flash with every breath…

Well, that was the start of an article I’ve been writing for the past three weeks or so. It was a difficult article to write and I’ve been stuck on more than one occasion – causing some frustration for me. There’s no need for me to do so now as similar thoughts have been expressed elsewhere with more grace than I would have allowed and a more informed perspective.

I encourage anyone who is interested in the subject to read the following posts and the comments that come along with them:

Sympathy for the Devil [John Nack]
2010: the year Flash became irrelevant [Serge Jespers comment is golden]
On Google, YouTube, HTML5, Adobe, and Flash [Ryan Stewart]
HTML 5 and Flash video [Lee Brimelow]
Flash Platform is at a crossroads [Ain Tohvri]
The Flash world that the standards people do not see [Robert Reinhardt]
HTML5 will save us all from the evils of Flash! [Andreas Rønning]
Why HTML 5 Won’t Kill Flash or Silverlight [Roger Peters]
Flash vs HTML5 – a few points for HTML5 advocates to consider :) [Neil Webb]
RE: Is Canvas the End of Flash? [Kevin Suttle]
Tech tabloids, Project Harmony, and the proposal of a ‘Flash’ tag in HTML5 [Kevin Suttle]
Growing tired of Apple [Rick Mason]
“The World is Moving to HTML 5″ and Other Flights of Fancy [Richard Leggett]
HTML5 and a Brave, Flash-Free, Open World? Uh… Not So Fast [Peter Kirn]
Why Flash Isn’t Going Anywhere, iPad Be Damned [Scott Gilbertson]
Open Access to Content and Applications [Kevin Lynch]
My Thoughts on the Future of Flash [Grant Skinner]
Web development will become much more complicated [Lee Brimelow]
Five Myths of HTML5 (vs. Adobe Flash) [Radley Marx]
The Future of Web Content – HTML5, Flash & Mobile Apps [Jeremy Allaire]
My thoughts on HTML 5, Flash and Innovation [Duane "Chaos" Nickull]
…more to come

My general take is this; Flash and HTML are not in any way enemies or opposed to one another. Both can serve very different purposes and both are useful in many different (and sometimes similar!) circumstances. It is ridiculous to go after Flash as it it is the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet and needs to “die” – as many have stated.

Am I biased? Hell, yes! I love working with the Flash Platform for many reasons and am heavily affiliated with Adobe. Do I hate HTML5 or any other tech due to my bias? Hell, No.

There is true evil in the world and it is not Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX, HTML5 or any other technology platform.

A call for sanity – everyone just chill out. It’ll be okay :)

UPDATE 1: In regard to Apple and iPad; Serge Jespers has a nice post, of which I’ve made comments on.

UPDATE 2: Okay, I give in – “Just To Put Things In Perspective…”