Author / Grant Skinner

Grant Skinner

The "g" in gskinner. Also the "skinner".

@gskinner

by Grant Skinner

New CreateJS Version Launched

I’m excited to announce the launch of new versions of the CreateJS libraries and tools. CreateJS is a suite of open source libraries and tools to make it easier to build really rich, interactive experiences using modern web standards.

This release added a ton of new features, including masks, multitouch support, run time generated sprite sheets, and better support for fluid or multi-resolution experiences. We also refined functionality, fixed a bunch of bugs, and added tutorials on a number of major topics for EaselJS.

The biggest change, which you’ll want to be aware of if you’re going to migrate existing content to the new versions is that all classes are now in a configurable namespace. You can either use the default “createjs” namespace, switch it to something more convenient, or configure it to not use any namespace at all to retain compatibility with legacy content.

I’m hoping to write up a more detailed overview of this release when time permits – things are very busy here at gskinner.com!

You can grab the latest, and get more info about CreateJS at createjs.com.

by Grant Skinner

Disable Local Security In Chrome (More Easily)

This is a quick follow up to my previous post about disabling local security errors in Chrome on OSX.

I’ve been working a lot with command files lately and thought I would share a simple one that you can double-click in the Finder to launch Chrome with the -disable-web-security flag set. This lets you test content locally that uses “sandboxed” JS features like accessing the pixel data of local images. Handy when working with EaselJS.

This comes with the obvious warning that you probably shouldn’t surf the web in this mode.

You can download the command here. For it to work properly, you need to quit Chrome prior to running the command. You may also need to open it up in a text editor and change the path to Chrome if it’s somewhere other than /Applications, or you want to use this command with Chrome Canary.

Command files are pretty handy – they let you package Terminal commands into a file that can be double clicked in the Finder. Definitely worth learning about if you’re a developer on OSX. There are also .terminal and .term files, which provide similar functionality with a little more control, but they seem to have some issues in the current version of Terminal.

by Grant Skinner

Announcing CreateJS

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.

CreateJS

We’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.

EaselJS

EaselJS 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.

TweenJS

TweenJS 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.

SoundJS

Audio 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.

PreloadJS

The 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.

Zoë

Zoë 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 CreateJS

We’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.

by Grant Skinner

Disable Local Security Errors in Chrome

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 /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app –args -disable-web-security

It lasts until you close Chrome. Handy for testing EaselJS content on your local file system.

Update: I’ve posted a .command file that you can double click in the Finder to run this more easily here.

by Grant Skinner

The Evolution of (Web) Development Tools

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.

by Grant Skinner

Updates to EaselJS, SoundJS, TweenJS & Zoë!

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
The latest release of EaselJS (our HTML5 display library) has a completely reengineered sprite sheet engine, which includes a host of new features: multi-image sprite sheets, variable frame dimensions, frame reuse, image preloading, and a new data format. Note that this change will require some minor updates to existing content using sprite sheets in EaselJS.

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
We’ve released a major update to Zoë, our tool for exporting sprite sheets from SWF animations. It supports EaselJS’s new data format, and adds some great new features like variable frame dimensions with more optimal rect packing, and intelligent frame reuse. The latter allows you to set a threshold for how similar frames can be, and Zoë will automatically remove similar frames and reuse them in animations. Testing on some old content, we saved 20-50% on file size with this feature, with virtually no decrease in animation quality.

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
This is the first “official” release of TweenJS. TweenJS uses a simple API of chained commands to sequence tweens and actions to create complex animations and timed events. For example:

Tween.get(ball).to({x:200},500).wait(750).to({alpha:0,visible:false}).call(onComplete);

TweenJS makes a great companion to EaselJS, and also has some basic support for working with CSS properties, which will be extended in future versions.

SoundJS v0.1.0
This is also the first official release of SoundJS, our library for working with the HTML5 Audio tag. Sound in HTML5 is a complete mess to work with, and this library aims to make it a bit easier. It handles preloading, allows you to assign a fixed number of tags to a specific sound, provides volume control, and manages sound interruption.

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
All of these projects are free and open source, released under the highly permissive MIT license, and are hosted on GitHub. I’d like to thank everyone who contributed to these releases, even if just by providing feedback or encouragement. Hopefully people find these useful in their own quests to build amazing content for the web!

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.

by Grant Skinner

Flash Player Mobile, a Post Mortem.

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.

by Grant Skinner

JSFL #include & classes.

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();