In the interest of reaching out to the CreateJS community we thought having a section devoted to showcasing projects would allow other developers the chance to show off all their hard work. Today we have the pleasure of a guest blogger: This post is by Jamie Alexander Founder & CTO of Moonrider.
The raging debate between native app developers and HTML5 developers is nothing short of religious warfare. Battle lines have been drawn, prominent warriors can be found in both camps and every now and then a soldier goes through a conversion and must defect across enemy lines. Every convert needs a catalyst to propel a new kind of thinking. The catalyst that converted me to the HTML5 camp came down from the heavens in the form of CreateJS.
Our company Moonrider develops a rich media platform for creating engaging, interactive experiences utilizing graphics, video and high performance audio. Our roots are in licensing a native iOS library to entertainment companies that are looking to create fun musical experiences with their creative assets. Over the last six months we shifted our business focus to interactive advertising, but we started to hit roadblocks with ad servers and publishers due to the lack of portability of our native solution.
Smarties Kaleidoscope, Moonrider
We felt we were caught between a rock and a hard place as our previous DOM based web implementation of our platform had performed poorly. We were very skeptical that we could achieve much better with the HTML5 canvas even though it was becoming widely adopted. It should be mentioned that we all stand on the shoulders of giants, such as the people behind the W3C standards who have defined HTML5 and the browser manufactures who have implemented it. This being said we need libraries that can speed up adoption, provide built in performance optimization and for us iOS converts offer a level of abstraction we have come to expect. CreateJS fit the bill in all these categories.
Adidas Moonrider
We explored a number of 2D Canvas based graphics libraries and eventually chose CreateJS. We were impressed by its performance, the growing legion of adopters as well as a burgeoning support community. With the library, we were able to port the graphics portion of our iOS engine developed primarily using the CoreGraphics and UIKit frameworks, almost directly. Many of the important constructs in these frameworks (as well as Cocos2D) are replicated in CreateJS such as the view/layer hierarchy, ease of translating across coordinate systems as well as handling transformation such as scaling and rotation. We also liked the experimental DOM Element which allows for easy layering of DOM based content into the Canvas.
Art Jam Moonrider Interactive Ad
With CreateJS and a little help from Google’s Web Audio API, we have achieved the level of performance our users have come to expect with our new HTML5 platform. We have also triggered a significant business opportunity in the interactive advertising space as we can easily embed our engine anywhere HTML can be delivered, across a wide range of operating systems, browsers and devices. Aside from supporting our existing customers we have dropped all native development and are not looking back. The missionary work now begins!
Check out more examples of Moonrider’s work!
 Jamie Alexander |
Jamie Alexander Founder & CTO | Moonrider |
| Jamie is a recognized technology leader and product designer with over 30 years (he started coding aged 8) of software architecture, design and development experience, as well as extensive experience building and managing technology teams. Prior to co-founding Moonrider, Jamie worked at IBM for 13 years as a software designer, initially at the IBM Toronto Software Lab cutting his teeth on e-commerce systems during the first dotcom boom. |