Montage remains open source, and we still find it a brilliant framework with huge potential to provide a foundation for web application development, though this is a more ambitious goal than what GWD has taken on. Ninja‘s niche seems to be filled well by GWD: first Google open-sourced both products, but the Ninja project was suddenly closed, which was surprising. When Google purchased Motorola Mobility, the disconnect became even more severe. Montage had deeper & broader goals, while Ninja was focused on what GWD appears to be today: a utility to create limited animations or small-scale sites, rather than a full-scale web development environment. At first, it looked like this all-star team would do great things quickly, but even in the early days, a disconnect between the framework and the authoring tool was apparent. Motorola had brought together expert developers from Apple, Adobe, Nokia, and Opera to build the Montage HTML5 framework, an authoring tool (Ninja), and a testing framework they called Screen. Currently, GWD does not emit Montage, though Twitter rumors continue to claim that it remains built on Montage. Back then, we were much more interested in the Montage framework, (which Ninja was built with, and which was also emitted as an output from Ninja), than in Ninja itself. The Strange History of Montage and NinjaĪ couple of years ago, I stumbled across Ninja: it was one of three then-secret projects at Motorola Mobility, and our company participated in early testing. They’ve scaled back some of the ambitions that were there with Ninja: the WebGL “materials” are gone - apparently inappropriate to the ad focus, as WebGL has too much overhead for mobile devices. Overall, GWD seems to be generally similar to what Adobe Edge Animate offers, though Edge Animate seems to have more detail, while GWD has a direct and simple UI. Yet overall this is more of an “animation builder” than it is an “app builder,” and it could be argued that the state of the art in HTML5 ads is heading more towards the “app” than the “animation.” It is also quite amazing that the tool as a whole, built from the ground up in HTML5, is so solid and responsive. Granted, there are many cool things in GWD that are nothing like Flash Pro: the 3D, especially, is stunning. Yet even if that is the case, should an HTML5 ad-builder simply emulate Flash Professional? I was mistaken to expect a general web development tool back then, and seeing GWD now, I’ve stopped looking for more than an ad-builder. Flash is dead, long live… Flash? Ever since I saw Ninja, I have been simultaneously impressed, while scratching my head: why on earth would someone want to duplicate the Flash Pro interface in the context of an authoring tool meant for HTML5 web app development? In the first place, there is a very Adobe-esque feel to the UI, but what really brings back the old days is the Flash timeline sitting there at the bottom.
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