Coming from the backbone side of web development we are trying to find a solution for a request to add visual and sound effects to our task management web application.
For starters - we are looking for a way to create an exploding stars effect like you see in games.
Can this be done with HTML5 canvas?
Should we use flash?
Any ideas how to start?
By now, just about anything Flash can do visually can be done by the HTML5 canvas on modern browsers.
For a 'star burst' visual effect, it sounds like a simple matter of creating a random array of objects that move away in random pre-set directions every time the canvas updates.
Example: http://jsfiddle.net/amDAW/ (click on the canvas to create a starburst)
As for sounds, this isn't handled in the canvas, but rather either the Audio tag or the fairly new WebAudio API. If you go with the former (more browser support), your biggest concern will be with resource preloading, but there are some helper libraries that can abstract this away (shameless advertising: https://github.com/jsweeneydev/ResourceLoader).
I want to create not complex interactive web application. It has some pinboard and user can create many simple objects on this pinboard (e.g. many small circles). After this user can:
move these objects
delete some of them or create new ones
make multiple selection and move/rotate elements of selected group
place members of the selected group in some special order (grid, line, circle, etc)
Zoom in/out pinboard
I think that I can use Flash/Flex or JavaScript/SVG/VML for this purpose. Disadvantage of Flash is that user must have plugin. Minus of JS/SVG/VML is that there aren't such powerfull developing tools as in Flash case, but if we use some library (like http://raphaeljs.com/) application won't require flash plug-in.
I'm finding right tool for this aim. So give me some recommendations, please. Thanks in advance.
I believe that you can achieve your goals without Flash using HTML(5), JavaScript and not the least the Canvas element present in HTML5.
Bottomline is, unless you today require your application to animate a lot of objects with framerates approaching three digits, the above should suffice fine and will also pair you with a prospective Web development platform. I am often sceptical of the new stuff, but HTML5 and Canvas are fairly standardized, patent-free and are being actively adopted.
The only benefit of going with Flash that I can think of is being backed by a rich API that does 2D as well as 3D, and the fact that you can later port your ActionScript code to say, JavaScript when you finally decide to go with HTML+JavaScript instead. Aside from having to perhaps rewrite part of your drawing stack, your ActionScript code will require minimal (syntactic mostly) changes.
I would still advise you to go with my first suggestion, unless you need live (camera) video publishing, 3D, sound editing and few features not available easily outside Flash Player. Which I don't think you will need.
You might want to have a look at existing similar projects, such as SVG Edit (MIT license).
With apple browsers not supporting flash or silverlight, there is a real incentive to avoid flash / silverlight to avoid losing that audience when building a web site. That being said there is certain functionality that it seems like you can only really do in flash / silverlight
for example alot of simple games where you can move things on the screen like this site all seem to be built in flash. also, a lot of drag and drop functionality where you can drag one object onto another like these game sites.
After lots of searching I can't find any that are not either flash or silverlight based.
In particular i am looking for drag and drop support of one element onto another
my question is if you need this type of functionality is javascript / html 5 able to do this type of stuff (so you can support iphone / ipad) or are you out of luck.
is there any resource that highlight examples or suggestions of trying to do this type of interactive functionality and how / if you can do this type of stuff without silverlight / flash. also, if anyone has any good examples of existing site who are doing that today that would be great as well.
This is going to be a long discussion about the ability of html5 to compete with flash.
In my opinion jquery is not any close to performance flash or silverlight animation give.
if the comparison is in terms of drag-and-drop, menu dropdowns, fadeIn.fadeOut - jQuery is competitive.
If i will see the jQuery cartoons with lot of layers and objects moving simultaneously - i will probably agree that jQuery has competitive performance.
the things are compare to see the difference:
magnifying glass over the raster picture
smoke/water/fire emulation
compound 3D objects like fractals with deep branches
when HTML5 will have it - then i will agree that it has competitive performance. All that i see today is picture slideshows and couple of games that work on html5.
You can check Easel.js by Grant Skinner, used in Pirates Love Daisies.
Also, other frameworks are:
enchant
limeJS
akihabara
JQuery UI has that for long time, works in all modern browsers, not just HTML5
JQuery UI Demos
You should checkout canvasdemos.com. It has a lot of good examples of what can be done. You can take a look at the source code behind these - some even help you in that regard. e.g. the pool game
Other good examples include the doom like "game" (you can walk around in 3D dungeons).
The Frog Log game was the winner in the 10KB coding challange
Also this was the first result for a search of html5 animation demo in google. It has links to 48 demos. Some of them are really cool. Unfortunately the code for a lot of these have been minified, but they still might give you a few ideas about what you can achieve.
So it's fine for making simple dressup type games. However, if you are looking to make anything that's CPU intensive, you should look into some performance benchmarks like this. HTML5/Canvas based animation is still quite far behind flash in terms of performance. Getting consistent behaviour across the various browsers will also be an issue.
HTML5 and related technologies (WebSockets, WebGL, web storage, File API, media capture, etc) are quickly moving towards parity with (and in some cases exceeding) what can be done in Flash/Silverlight.
The HTML5 Rocks slides are a reasonable starting point to see what is possible (you need an HTML5 capable browser). In particular, the Canvas example demonstrates image manipulation (drag, rotate, resize) which is the core functionality needed to implement dress-up games.
Flash was designed for animation. The tweens were meant to be used for animating drawings. Because it was marketed to every Tom, Dick and Harry, people started using it to animate hideous menus and flying content text. And Adobe complied to this new use, building an abode of total chaos.
Flash is still the best animation engine for the web, it should never have catered to full flash websites.
Many HTML5 fans out there, but it needs to be said: Canvas is a decade behind Flash. But for everything other than animation, Flash is an abomination.
In old browsers, you can emulate drag'n'drop of elemnts from the DOM but in new browsers, you can also drag'n'drop files (like images) and there are events for it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DragDrop/Drag_and_Drop
For flash-like animations, it's been possible with JavaScript for a long time but doing some bug ones was really hard and often slowing down the page.
Now, there is canvas and WebGL that allow you to do it in a more convinient way (for the complex ones).
And with canvas, WebGL, CSS animations (if you use the tric to make the browser think it's 3D), you get CPU accelerated so it's way faster.
There is also requestAnimationFrame that allows to optimise the reflows and therefore the script.
The best example I know on what can be done is the Quake II port to the Web :
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhMN0wlITLk&feature=player_embedded
Project's site: http://code.google.com/p/quake2-gwt-port/
as said in soe of the answers above, I'm pretty sure jquery's draggable/droppable plugin will do the job for you if you just need a basic drag and drop dress me up type of game. Basic premise is this:
in the default example, your avatar to wear the clothes would be a div with a png/gif.jpg background image of a girl/boy whatever(instead of an orange drop here background)
the clothes will be the "drag me to my target" objects in the example. you can create them as divs or even image tags that have the draggable class in them so you can drag them around and drop them in the orange boxes/avatars.
you can save the data using ajax, which is also covered in the examples there(or other tutorials in the net, it's easy)
???
PROFIT
Just try it out and see for yourself. If you need any help you can just ask here again, but I do think that the jquery UI answers are valid answers to your problem.
I don't have an example site to show you, but I'm pretty sure given some images and stuff I can whip out something...if I had the time lol.
You can definitely do these "flash-like" things now in HTML5 web browsers. Check out the examples at http://www.chromeexperiments.com/
In fact HTML5/CSS3/JS can do anything flash can do. But there are some drawback :
It is not yet mature. Lot of bugs, lot of difference in implementation depending of browsers and many people simply don't have yet browsers that support it.
Adobe has a really nice set of tools that help making complex flash applications. This doesn't exist (yet ?) at the same level for HTML5.
On a side note, neither flash, neither HTML5 will really shine on mobiles phone. People prefer native applications anyway. You might need to provide a web version, but you'll need too a app version (one per big phone player).
We can speculate how HTML5 will rule the word in the next few years, but as of now, impact are limited outside of nice looking demo that consume 100% of CPU (really, really bad for mobile device).
For drag and drop support, anybody can do that - in HTML4 and in any browser with a few lines of javascript - inside one page, or can think to do it on between 2 browser windows of the same website. Doing drag & drop between browser and any native desktop application is another thing.
For a great example of what you can do with HTML5 in terms of drag and drop, I suggest you take a look at this article and in particular the short demo at the beginning. The article also highlights a few other goodies that come with HTML5, such as localStorage and the HTML5 Canvas.
For a more detailed tutorial on the HTML5 drag-n-drop API specifically (really it is a Javascript API), take a look at this other article. It is dated from December 2009 but still valid.
Lastly, this video gives you a good insight on some of the cool visual effects that you'll be able to do with HTML5 (SVG, Canvas, CSS3, WebGL, ...). More of a marketing video I'll admit but a good illustration of some of the more powerful HTML5 features (at least from a visual stand point) and of what we'll start seeing in our browsers in a not so distant future...
Disclaimer: I don't work for Mozilla. I just happen to have researched this topic in the past and found that the material produced by Mozilla, and in particular the demos from Paul Rouget, to be the most instructive.
jQuery UI is an amazing library...
Drag: http://jqueryui.com/demos/draggable/#default
Drop: http://jqueryui.com/demos/droppable/
I belive that the droppable examples will answer your question of "In particular i am looking for drag and drop support of one element onto another"
I'm implementing the Soundcloud custom player ( https://github.com/soundcloud/soundcloud-custom-player ) on my site.
I would like to create a spectrum analyzer which moves based on the sound.
I really don't have any idea as to where to start or if it even is possible at all.
Please check out my site to see what I mean: http://dev.upcoming-djs.com
At the right side you see the player and when you click on play it starts playing and the equalizer starts moving.
This is currently a fake effect, but I want it to move with the sound.
All suggestions and/or help is of course much appreciated.
Added my comment as an answer:
You might want to look into the HTML5 Audio Data API. Other than that, you're going to need Flash if you want a legit spectrum analyzer (which, by the way, is what you're asking for. not an equalizer).
Edit:
For anyone interested, I have a quick and dirty demo here: http://kevincennis.com/audio/ (Chrome only)
Source is un-minified, but not particularly well commented. Feel free to steal whatever you want.
The simple answer is this can not be done just using javascript.
Your options are to use to a plugin like flash which has a extensive audio API and is installed on a large percentage of web users browsers as a plugin or to look into the experimental HTML5 audio API.
hope this helps
Sound manager 2
Take a look at
http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/demo/360-player/canvas-visualization.html#hifi=1
I wrote a article about this, if you are interested. http://www.flobii-cc.com/2011/04/simple-fft-web-visualization.html
I used the SoundManager2- API ( need flash) to get the spectrum data and HTML5 Canvas to visualize them.
(The HTML5 Audio API is limited to only a few browsers)
Is it possible to show how many % of the video is loaded?
I just need a simple string like: 32% loaded...
(I use non-streaming (progressive loading))
The FLV player that is built in, you can pretty much only do what you see, so displaying the % loaded, if not already displayed in the skin itself, is either not supported, or not documented. You can make your own skin http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/flvplayback_programming.html or use one of the many other available options http://www.google.com/search?q=flv+player, or try the Widget Browser version (which should be CS4 compatible) of the HTML5 Video Player Widget, and that player is based on the following http://www.kaltura.org/project/HTML5_Video_Player it is theme-able. I've not seen a way to show the percentage yet, but perhaps their docs show how to do it.
There is another reference for talking back and forth between Flash and JavaScript, http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/156/tn_15683.html, but you'd need to know what to call, and again, the built in player doesn't appear to be documented well, at least from external interaction, or modifications of the skins themselves.
I know this is not dreamweaver player and it doesn't show %, but this is what I use in my projects http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/
It is a pretty cool player.