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We live in the era of CSS3, embeddable web fonts, & the text-shadow property, yet this is what represents IE 9’s support for web typography: http://jsdo.it/event/svggirl/img/movie/img_loading_01_en.png
If you’re going to resort to raster graphics at least do a better job hanging that apostrophe in the word “it’s”.
Don't you get it, now web pages don't require IE because it's broken and doesn't support web standards, they require IE because it's so web standard compliant that it's not compatible with any other browser!!
It's brilliant marketing!
"it's not compatible with any other browser"
Works just fine with Chrome (beta channel) here on my Macbook Pro 5,5. Quite fluid too, except for the "floating mountain part". Certainly more than 10fps average.
Same here with Chrome on Ubuntu Linux. Played fine.
Chrome 10.0.648.205 on win7 here. Played flawlessly and smoothly.
It seems to be a cheap knock-off of the similarly bad marketing of Apple: http://www.apple.com/html5/
In Apple's defense, their demos do work (mainly) in all WebKit based browsers.
That's definitely technically impressive. The thing is, though, I will never understand why people show this kind of thing off. Nobody is going to make a video like this in SVG except when they're showing off the capability of the browser - it's simply not worth the money or the time.
I mean, sure, it's a tech demo, and a damn impressive one at that. But what's it showing off? Those of us who know why it's technically impressive know that it's never going to be worth it to do anything of this scale. Those of us who don't don't see any difference between this and, say, a flash video.
Regardless of whatever it is that I'm missing, this is fantastic. I can't even imagine just how difficult this would have been to make.
It's not like there have been thousands of Flash movies and games made this way. No no no.
It's showing off that SVG movie playback is there, and that we killed the chicken and egg problem of another area of Flash: now we only need authoring tools whereas before who would build SVG authoring tools when there was no player?
Which brings us to how difficult it could have been to be made, as it really comes down to what authoring tools they did use. Interestingly enough, after the animation they offer a "simple mode" to trivially alter colors of the animation.
I see it as a strong signal of: - cross-browser compatibility went a step further. - one more thing we don't need a proprietary crashing blob anymore as there is an open alternative. I was also pleasantly surprised at how well it played on my Mac and Chrome. It was a bit slow at start on Firefox 4, and was (surprisingly to me) even faster than Chrome on Safari.
I'd disagree that it's never going to be worth doing something of that scale. Protovis/D3/Raphael visualizations could easily get to that level of complexity. I've already used Protovis to display 2mb geojson files, so I think people will use all the SVG performance they can get.
I disagree. I view this sort of exercise the same way I view concept cars. These sort of "what if" exercises serve to push the boundaries and show what we can accomplish with this technology. It might also serve to spark an idea in someone who was previously unaware they could do something like that.
I find this rather bizarre, not least for the incredibly short cartoon skirt. Who is it aimed at? Do the creators think that they will win over some mythical basement-dwelling anime-loving "nerds" (male, of course) with this campaign?
Is this what the marketing department thinks tech-savvy people are into?
EDIT: I mistakenly thought this was made by Microsoft; of course a more careful reading on my part would have made it obvious that it is not.
Occam's Razor: it is geeky because the company behind it loves geeky things and, indeed, is pretty much based on them.
(Broadly, on the intersection of tech and geeky, for any value of "geeky" be it anime subcultures or D&D, it is an inevitable consequence of "scratch your own itch" that tech overallocates resources to the fields of interest techy people are likely to have versus those they are not likely to have, which will tend to reproduce similarly lopsided distribution in the future. This is profitably exploitable. Exploit it.)
I see your point; and I think most of my confusion stemmed from the fact that I thought this was made by Microsoft. I simply didn't read carefully enough, and was under the impression it was part of a Microsoft official marketing campaign (like the Google Chrome comic books or something).
I love the business hustle view at the end of your comment, though!
works fine in chrome... the entire thing is wrong on so, so many levels...
Yeah...I got to the baby voice and the phone and shut it off. It's a little pedo-creepy.
Not so much a baby voice as a robot voice. Robotic voices often have high pitch distortion kind of tone in Japanese culture.
You missed the thing! It starts after the video finishes!
Crashed mobile safari on my original iPad.
Yup: exceeded memory. The thing is big: Chrome task manager announces the tab is 426mb.
I love that the progress loader behaves just like windows 98 application installers do. Linear count up until object 56/107 loaded... 30 second pause... sudden jump to 80 objects loaded, and the loading UI flips out trying to catch up.
Microsoft is nothing if not consistent(ly bad).
It's an object counter progress loader, not a progress bar. It has no reason to be linear.
That's fine, but the way the UI behaves appears to be tied to the load % completion. So the fact that it freaks out is a bit of a problem.
Probably showing my age here, but to me it is very reminiscent of the IE4 DHTML tech demos (that's right, that's a four).
They were technically impressive in what they were able to achieve, but it was technology no one was ever going to (and never did to my knowledge) use.
Volume warning for those at work!
Minus the IE9 politics, I kinda liked that.
Felt a little "Witch Hunter Robin" meets "GITS SAC".
More like a less gloomy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain
without the musical aesthetic or the barest sliver of sanity that SEL had.
and 100% more creepy near-upskirt camera angles.
Throw in a little Akira too. Post-apocalyptic neo-Tokyo with crazy huge stuffed animal halucinations... yeah.
For those wondering, the voice at the beggining is counting from one to nine in Japanese: "ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, nana, hachi, kyu". Probably related to the IE version progression.
Then says "I. E. nine ..." and I don't get the remainder.
i love the IE electrical ghost brainslug thingie, that explains so much.
"IE 9: It will go all Exorcist on your brain, then make you hallucinate."
Curious. Am I the only one who can't seem to make it work even in IE9 (Tried Ubuntu/Chromium Beta, Ubuntu/FF3.5~, Windows7/Chrome Canary, Windows7/IE9 (and Compatibility Mode, just for kicks), and Windows7/FF4). Perhaps it's just overwhelmingly more underwhelming than the fanfare? For reference, I get to the part after the video has ended and the background slides away from behind the frame. After that point, the music plays for a little while and everything else is quite frozen and non-interactive.
yeahi can't imagine why it's ie9 only. also, 10 frames per second? i can't feel that's impressive. it still looks choppy. it's not till about 15 that most people stop noticing choppyness, and really talk to me when you're doing 30 fps.
10fps? wow it ran super smooth on FF4... awwww...
it is programatically locked to 10fps I do believe. They even say specifically that is what it runs at.
Yeah, IE has a tendency to make people lose their mind.