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Slices of Apple episode 8: Real Artists Ship part 2
Slices of Apple is a documentary series exploring the success of Apple as a company. It seeks to educate business leaders, entrepreneurs and laypeople about how Apple keeps delivering consistently great products. Ryan Nielsen is a co-founder of Tumult and tells us about a number of important things at Apple. One that every business owner should pay attention to is the notion of a "directly responsible individual," or DRI. For every product or service, the buck stops with the DRI. This is part of the reason Apple can create great products that work together, because there's always one person to go to for questions about any particular aspect of Apple's offerings. Steve Jobs liked to say Apple was organized like a giant startup, and the DRI is one great example. By keeping your organization as flat as possible you are much more likely to achieve sustainable results in the marketplace. Other important topics: Customer feedback, a further examination of Radar, and how teams are organized at Apple to facilitate great ideas.
Slices of Apple episode 7: Real Artists Ship
This week's episode is the first of the second "chapter" in Slices of Apple. Previous episodes laid the groundwork for what comes next: The second Steve Jobs era at Apple. Specifically: Episode one provided context for the innovative atmosphere and the deep appreciation of design and engineering in Silicon Valley. Episode two took a look at the dark years of Apple, and the return of Jobs through the acquisition of NeXT assets at Apple. Episode three was about the front line workers for Apple, be they retail or consultants. Episode four featured Pheebo, and lessons learned at the Grove Apple Store in Los Angeles. Episodes five and six took us back to the 1990's, before Jobs returned, as we spoke to executives at Backblaze who worked at Apple during that time. In "Real Artists Ship" we'll talk to Jonathan Deutsch, co-founder of Tumult, a really cool HTML5 authoring environment. Jonathan discusses some key ingredients of Apple's success, including how to find great people and Apple's repository of bugs and fixes, Radar. He answers questions on building great teams, work/life balance and managing priorities.
Mac App of the Week: Hype 2.0 is a solid WYSIWYG tool for HTML5 animation and interactive graphics
When I made the transition from print designer to web producer in January, I wanted to make my graphic designing skills with me. PennLive.com, my day job, utilizes HTML5 to make the site desktop- and mobile-friendly and steers clear of Flash. While I knew some coding, I didn't know enough to create some of the elaborate interactive projects that other newspapers have done, such as the New York Times' Snow Fall and reshaping New York projects. In addition to custom components, the staff utilized jQuery and HTML5. Nothing beats a good, solid foundation in writing code, but as someone making the transition from designing full-time in InDesign, I wanted to work with a WYSIWYG editor. Adobe came out with Edge in 2011, but it requires a Creative Cloud subscription. Sencha Animator is available as well, but the US$99 price tag might be a deterrent. Then there's Hype. Created by two former Apple engineers, it is a low-cost, yet powerful tool for creating keyframe-based animation in HTML 5. Version 1 made its debut in May 2011, and 2.0 was released on August 20. Some impressive work has been done with Hype, including this graphic from the Los Angeles Times, and I was eager to try it. Design If you've ever used Flash, Hype will look very familiar. Most of the program centers around the stage, with timeline and properties bars beneath it. On the stage, you can expand various panels for adding scenes to your content or various elements. The preview button allows you to toggle among your browser of choice to view your project. Additional panels include an inspector, where you do the majority of your tweaking, a list of project resources, colors and fonts. Hype lets you bring your own fonts into the system through custom CSS or browsing popular open-source Google fonts, which is a really nice touch. In addition to the stage, you'll spend most of your time with the Inspector panel. The Swiss Army knife of Hype controls document settings, scene settings, metrics, elements, text, actions, and identity. There's a number of pre-set canvas sizes you can use based off standard monitors, iPhone and iPad screens. You can change stage sizes on the fly, which is good for when a project's demands suddenly change on you and you don't want to start over from scratch. Hype's Jonathan Deutsch equipped me with a copy of Hype and pointed me to the site's extensive documentation and YouTube tutorials. A lot of the newest tutorials addresses the features of Hype 2.0 -- the biggest being the ability to preview your work on iOS using the free Hype Reflect. To go along with this, Hype lets you build the ability to add touch and swipe events so your project is desktop- and mobile-friendly at the same time. Other new features include the aforementioned web fonts, audio actions, curved motion paths and more. Use I had a bit of Flash training about six years ago, and a lot of it came back to me as I played around with Hype. If you understand the concept of key frames and animating elements between those frames, you won't have an issue with Hype. You can bring in all sorts of material to Hype: images, video, HTML widgets and more. A lot of Hype's power comes from using the record button. In the timeline, either click where you want your key frame to be, or type in the time on the timeline. Hit the record button and either drag the object where you want it to go next or use the inspector panel to control things such as changing color, shape or opacity. You can establish different key frames for elements in the properties bar: movement can have one set of key frames, while opacity and color can have their own key frames. Creating some of the graphic elements is where my frustrations came in. I really wish there was an easy way to create something as simple as a triangle in Hype without having to mask part of another shape or bring it in as an image. Food for thought for a future release. Some of the keyboard shortcuts were a bit perplexing as well. I'd like to see a switch to using the standard zoom keyboard shortcuts (⌘+ and ⌘-) rather than the ones built into the app (⌘> and ⌘<), which didn't even work when I tried using them because they conflict with bringing up the preference panel. (Update: Deutsch explained that the keyboard shortcut match those for Keynote, which makes sense. Part of it was user error on my end as well. To zoom, I needed to press the shift key while doing ⌘> and ⌘<.) One of my favorite Hype features is an ongoing tracking of browser and mobile compatibility. I learned that no matter what I did, the animation I was developing was not going to be Opera-friendly. Internet Explorer hated my attempt at using background gradients. My test project concerned homicides in Harrisburg in 2013, and each new discovery in Hype added to our excitement for the project. We figured out we could link to our site's video player in Hype, letting us integrate previously posted videos into the graphic. You can see a version of the test graphic (note only one button is active) here. After creating the graphic, I added a couple of swipe gestures and did a preview through Hype Reflect. If on the same network as the Hype desktop client, your iOS device will show up as an available preview option. In Hype Reflect, you have the option to test your animation in mobile Safari, access console messages and utilize a mirroring option that lets you make changes on the Mac and see them instantly on Hype. Using Hype Reflect, I was able to see that the video link didn't work on mobile, and that the text rendered a bit differently than from the desktop version. Ah, well, back to the drawing board! Another feature I really like is the ability to export to Dropbox, in addition to exporting to a folder. That made it very easy for me to share the test animation with a couple co-workers. You can also export your project as a widget for use in iBooks or Dashboard. Conclusion If you're wanting to transition from doing Flash-based animation to HTML 5-based, Hype is a fantastic tool to start with if the thought of hand-coding interactive graphics sends a chill down your spine. I'm looking forward to using this more. The 2.0 release addresses a lot of issues reviewers had with the initial release two years ago, and the support system is excellent. Tumult features work being done with Hype on its site and is experimenting with doing live tutorials through Google+. Hype retails for $59.99 through the Mac App Store or Tumult, but is on sale for $29.99 until September 10. Those who purchased Hype 1.6 after July 20 are eligible for a free upgrade, and volume licensing is available. A 15-day trial is on site for those who want to give it a try.
TUAW and MacTech interview: Tumult
Tumult is a timeline-based tool for creating HTML 5 animation on your Mac. Neil Ticktin (Editor-in-Chief, MacTech Magazine) interviews Jonathan Deutsch of Tumult at WWDC 2012. Jonathan was kind enough to tell us about their thoughts on the announcements on WWDC, and how it will affect their plans moving forward.
The two Apple engineers who created Hype
Jonathan Deutsch, co-founder of Tumult Inc., recently talked to The Startup Foundry about leaving a stable job at Apple to build Hype, the new HTML5 Animation Builder for Mac OS X. Despite some provocative headlines linking to the story, the reason the founders took on this challenge wasn't borne out of Apple's attitude towards Flash. Released last Friday exclusively through the Mac App Store for an introductory price of US$29.99, Hype embraces the HTML5 family of technologies -- including new HTML5 tags, CSS3, and the latest JavaScript technology -- to allow customers to create standards-based interactive websites that rival Flash. Over the weekend, Tumult's product became the top-grossing application on Apple's software marketplace, topping Pages, Aperture, iPhoto, Keynote, Numbers, and iMovie. Prior to opening shop for himself, Deutsch was the engineering manager for Mac OS X Mail's back end. He also worked on Mac OS X's software update mechanism, automation technology, and even Steve-note demonstrations. Despite a successful career at Apple, he always wanted to have his own company, saying it's "in the blood." He and his business partner Ryan Nielsen, another senior member of the Mac OS X team, both saw a new wave of "Web 3.0" technologies, more commonly referred to as "HTML5," hitting the market. "It was always in the back of my mind that for any technology shift you'd need tools to help out," Deutsch told The Startup Foundry. "I'm really a tools guy, though we tend to call them 'apps' nowadays." Deutsch said the idea for Hype came after a trip to Europe. He wanted to showcase photos from his travels on a website with animations and pizazz. Hand-coding the site he imagined in HTML5 would've been a "nightmare," and Flash wouldn't be appropriate for mobile access to the site. When he couldn't find a better way to easily build an interactive website for his photos, Deutsch recognized the opportunity to build a solution for himself and start a business around it. Walking away from an established career at Apple was bittersweet. Deutsch says he formed a deep social and professional network at the Cupertino company that was painful to say goodbye to, but if he had chosen to stay at Apple, Deutsch would've been left to wonder what if. "'Regret Minimization' is what should win out in life," he says, "so it did." [via Business Insider]
