Free HTML5 animations for all
September 30, 2013 4:27 PM   Subscribe

Google Web Designer is a free and neat little HTML5 animation authoring tool (system requirements)
posted by Blazecock Pileon (34 comments total) 66 users marked this as a favorite
 
hot damn
posted by hellojed at 4:42 PM on September 30, 2013


Compulsive Urge to Compete with All The Things: Dreamweaver Edition
posted by ethansr at 4:49 PM on September 30, 2013 [15 favorites]


More like Google Ad Designer. lolamirite?
posted by prufrock at 4:56 PM on September 30, 2013 [6 favorites]


Seems to be designed to set up adverts and other stuff; also does NOT like to import your existing HTML or, god forbid, ASP files. Still, very pretty and you can swipe the bits it generates to use in your own stuff.
posted by Old'n'Busted at 4:59 PM on September 30, 2013


Does it do the little computer-generated voices? Because I ain't using it unless it makes my computer talk like The Electric Englishman.
posted by mittens at 4:59 PM on September 30, 2013


More like Google Ad Designer. lolamirite?

If you download and run it, it gives the option of making anything on an open canvas.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:00 PM on September 30, 2013


Anyway, I thought it was neat and worth sharing. If the mods want to delete this post, feel free.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:02 PM on September 30, 2013


So, I've heard this might be what became of Ninja, which made a big splash and then just disappeared so totally that I was sure it had to have been bought out and the devs hit with an NDA.

It looks like it might be a pretty sweet tool for making HTML5 game animations to use in your engine of choice.
posted by jason_steakums at 5:02 PM on September 30, 2013 [2 favorites]


Thirty seconds to create my first bouncy-ball animation, and it would've been half that if I hadn't misunderstood the timeline. Oh my, this is nice.
posted by mittens at 5:14 PM on September 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


That reminds me, today while ferrying pizzas around outer Brunswick my brain was hit by a cosmic ray from outer space, and I thought, "Hey, I wonder if I could install Android to my old laptop?"

It turns out the answer is, maybe.
posted by JHarris at 5:48 PM on September 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


I kind of expected the "all animations on this page created with Google Web Designer" to end in "of course."
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:48 PM on September 30, 2013


More like Google Ad Designer. lolamirite?

It does indeed look like the ideal tool for ad designers looking for a HTML5 tool now Flash is unfashionable. Hey, that's what everyone wanted them to do, right?
posted by Artw at 5:53 PM on September 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


Ehh... adblock still works for me and this won't have the gaping security holes of outdated Flash versions so it'll lessen the family tech support calls. I'm okay with that.
posted by jason_steakums at 5:59 PM on September 30, 2013 [2 favorites]


JHarris: "That reminds me, today while ferrying pizzas around outer Brunswick my brain was hit by a cosmic ray from outer space, and I thought, "Hey, I wonder if I could install Android to my old laptop?"

It turns out the answer is, maybe.
"

Look here first. Works a treat.
posted by Samizdata at 6:03 PM on September 30, 2013


If you liked that you'll love tridiv.
posted by 23 at 6:28 PM on September 30, 2013 [8 favorites]


Ooooh, I saw this and right away wanted to give it to my kids.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:44 PM on September 30, 2013


Timeline defaults to snapping to 10ths of a second, though you can turn that off and use 100ths of a second. That feels all sorts of wrong.
posted by RobotHero at 6:48 PM on September 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


Says minimum Windows 7. Anyone know if it'll run on Vista?
posted by davebush at 6:56 PM on September 30, 2013


I liked it too. Thanks BP.
posted by sweetkid at 7:40 PM on September 30, 2013


Hurrah. I can't wait until the weekend, when I can spend an afternoon or two learning to use this complex, somewhat niche software from Google. I'm sure it will integrate well with their other useful software I have become proficient with, such as Google Reader, Google Wave and Google Building Maker. Oh, the wonderful things I will make.
posted by oulipian at 7:41 PM on September 30, 2013 [9 favorites]


The difference is that this one is a standalone desktop app, though. They may stop updating it, but it's not going to disappear.
posted by jason_steakums at 7:44 PM on September 30, 2013


This is really neat. Thank you!
posted by ~ at 8:09 PM on September 30, 2013


>jason_steakums

Pretty sure you hit the nail-on-the-head, I installed and tested 30minutes ago and in my recycle-bin is a file titled: "ninja-tmp-2.zip" from exactly the same time-frame...
posted by jkaczor at 10:32 PM on September 30, 2013


Ha, cool! I guess Ninja got swept up in the Motorola acquisition, it was developed under them as was Montage (a pretty spiffy-looking web app development framework) and Screening (the test suite for Montage), I wonder if Google's gonna release whatever those turned into.
posted by jason_steakums at 11:05 PM on September 30, 2013


Someone needs to tell the folks at Infinite Loop that they can now officially take iWeb out of the closet and out to the woodshed where FrontPage was last seen.
posted by trackofalljades at 11:45 PM on September 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


The funny thing is is that it pretty much is a clone of Microsoft Expression Blend, except Blend worked on WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and Silverlight and Google Web Designer works on HTML 5. The look is even the same...compare this with this. Blend was first released in 2007.
posted by Xoc at 12:13 AM on October 1, 2013


Xoc: "compare this with this"
Looks like every good damn graphic design tool I've come across the last 15 years. How many ways can you do an RBG swath?
posted by brokkr at 1:16 AM on October 1, 2013


Blend uses the same basic palettes-over-a-pasteboard UI that Dreamweaver and Illustrator and Flash and Freehand et al have been using for over a decade. I'll give them half a point for using a light-over-dark theme, but even that is arguably a minor variation of Lightroom, which also shipped in 2007.
posted by ardgedee at 4:23 AM on October 1, 2013


Impressions from five-minute test drive:

1. Why, hello unified UI! Why is the universal solution to "How do we get our app to run on both Windows and Mac" always "Create a third UI that resembles neither of them" rather than "Exploit the native UI components of each of them"? The answer might be "because that would take more work," but I suspect most of time the real answer is "because this way we get to fully control the UI exactly the way we want it", even though the net result has to be framed within the OS's native UI and requires creating new, buggy interface elements that the OS provides, debugged, for free. (See Google's own screenshot on their announcement page: They conveniently crop the OS X menu bar off their screenshot) (see, for comparison, the scrollbars that Adobe will never, ever, ever get to work perfectly in their floating palettes)
2. The HTML pasteboard defaulted to absolute positioning of any elements, kind of like FrontPage. Although probably a necessary evil if you're letting people freeform page layouts. The means for structured layouts is there but not as obvious to get at.
3. Pretty buggy around the edges. I got it to break previously defined font settings just by clicking things quickly. Still and all, it's beta -- even if Google's notion of "beta", so I'll give that one a pass.
4. The timeline is ubiquitous and not dismissable. Which I kind of get -- anything can be animated at any time, even whole page layouts -- but seems like a screen-gobbling liability sitting there unused most of the time.

Might be useful. I'll keep an eye on it.
posted by ardgedee at 4:48 AM on October 1, 2013


As much as I like this, "Web Designer" is a really bad choice of name - this is an animation tool, not really a wysiwyg page editor or anything like that. Unless those features are going to be added in and the name is more what it will be than what it is currently (which may be where Montage is going to pop up, if they roll all three Mobility html5 projects into one editor).
posted by jason_steakums at 7:34 AM on October 1, 2013


More like Google Ad Designer. lolamirite?

Just like Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere Pro are Adobe Web, Print, and Video, Ad Designer applications?
posted by juiceCake at 7:36 AM on October 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


Yeah, I thought of Blend too - though that one is no longer with us, is it? Or at least it's been eaten by Visual Studio.
posted by Artw at 7:46 AM on October 1, 2013


also does NOT like to import your . . . ASP files.
posted by Old'n'Busted


That's about as epoynysterical as it gets.
posted by yerfatma at 7:58 AM on October 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


Why, hello unified UI! Why is the universal solution to "How do we get our app to run on both Windows and Mac" always "Create a third UI that resembles neither of them" rather than "Exploit the native UI components of each of them"? The answer might be "because that would take more work," but I suspect most of time the real answer is "because this way we get to fully control the UI exactly the way we want it", even though the net result has to be framed within the OS's native UI and requires creating new, buggy interface elements that the OS provides, debugged, for free.

It is a stupendous amount of additional work to create a "native UI" app that runs on Windows and Mac. If you do, it's basically two apps that share some code, not the same app in any meaningful sense. This has been tried before, and the results still leave much to be desired after a decade and more of work.
posted by amorphatist at 9:28 PM on October 1, 2013


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