I’ve written in the past about why it’s time to dump Flash content from your website. I’ve done this on my own sites and am not recommending Flash for any newly created websites that I manage for my customers.
So does that mean that my websites have to be completely static in nature without any movement or pizzazz? Well, for the past few months, the answer has been an unfortunate yes. While there are ways to create some javascript files but I never found any decent tools to work with. So my sites right now are Flash-free but admittedly, a little bit boring.
But I recently found a tool called Hype for Mac OS X that may bring back the Flash-like animations to my site, and doing so in glorious HTML5. That means that visitors to your site from iPhones and iPads get to see all of your animated content and videos. Finally!
I downloaded Hype from the Apple App store for a mere $30. I decided to check it out because of the positive reviews that it had gotten. For 30 bucks, I wasn’t expecting too much. But this little app has exceeded my expectations thus far.
If you’ve ever used Apple’s iWeb WYSIWYG HTML editor than you’ll quickly find your bearings within Hype. The tool layout has essentially been copied directly from iWeb. Considering the developers of Hype are former Apple software developers, it makes complete sense.
The Hype tool uses the concepts of timelines and keyframes for recording animations for your website. If you’ve ever created Flash content, it’s essentially the same thing and Hype makes the animation process fairly painless.
But not all is perfect. Some complaints I have about Hype are:
- The application is a bit limited in what can be done with animations. If you’re expecting a Dreamweaver replacement, you will be disappointed because it’s simply not that feature-rich
- There’s not a ton of documentation out there yet. You can go here to see the official documentation and there are forums here. If you can’t find the answer to your question in one of these two places, unfortunately, you are left to figure it out for yourself.
- The HTML 5 content created varies widely from browser to browser when viewed online. In my experience (as of the writing of this article), the content looks best in Apple’s own Safari and Google’s Chrome browser. It looks worst in (unsurprisingly) Internet Explorer 6, 8 and 9, as well as (surprisingly) Firefox 4 and 5.
But time will hopefully fix all of my current gripes. Hype is only version 1 software so it’s got a long way to go before it develops into a much more robust application will all the bells and whistles. Secondly, as the popularity of the app grows, you’ll find additional online resources to get answers to your questions about how to use the software in various situations. And lastly, keep in mind that HTML5 is still at a working draft stage in the W3C. Once HTML5 becomes an official standard, all of your modern browsers will implement HTML standards identically and therefore all of the content will look the same no matter what browser you are using.
While I love Hype and creating HTML5 content, I’m not completely comfortable migrating my websites to it yet for the simple fact that some of the HTML 5 looks really bad in certain popular browsers. But it should be only a matter of months until compatibility issues are a thing of the past so I would recommend buying and experimenting with Hype now so you will be ready to create amazing animated sites without Flash in the not too distant future.
