acceptable ads

https://acceptableads.org/  — get your ad whitelisted for Adblock Plus. No animation allowed.

HTML5 banner dev link roundup

Google’s HTML5 Toolkit

http://www.richmediagallery.com/resources/html5-toolkit#h5ToolkitPath:%2Fhtml5%2Ftoolkit~

Grant Skinner’s take on using CreateJS for banners:

http://createjs.com/html5ads/

GSAP banner forum:

http://greensock.com/forums/forum/12-banner-animation/

svg animation

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/09/creating-cel-animations-with-svg/

html5 banners with sprite sheets

using this to generate sprite sheets:
http://draeton.github.io/stitches/

and this to compress them:
https://tinypng.com/

this for animation, as long as I can get away with the +100kb file size:
https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/gsap/latest/TweenMax.min.js

links roundup

Lots of change in my line of work, which is ad banners, animation, and front end development. This blog is mostly just a place where I save links for myself; if someone stumbles upon it, so much the better.

I'm looking forward to the arrival of web animations, but it's not in browsers yet:
http://danielcwilson.com/tags/web-animations-api/

SVG has a way to go before it's as useful as Flash vectors were, but it's interesting -
http://codepen.io/chrisgannon/blog/my-first-svg-banner-ad

For SVG I have been enjoying this podcast:
http://svgimmersion.com/

With browsers starting to drop support for Flash, we're finally going 100% html. It's still the wild west as far as specs go, but the IAB is working on it: http://www.iab.net/displayguidelines

Web fonts are a problem when you're trying to keep a banner small. Font subsetting is a must -
http://fontsubsetter.com/en-US

We're doing a lot of greensock animation and CSS transitions too, I use https://autoprefixer.github.io/ to help with vendor prefixes

tips for reducing html5 file size, from Doubleclick

https://support.google.com/richmedia/answer/6261897?hl=en#animate

ethics of ad blocking

I'm not even done reading it, but let's save the link:
http://www.marco.org/2015/08/11/ad-blocking-ethics

greensock article on html5 banners

Arguing for higher file sizes, and naturally, Greensock animations:

http://greensock.com/html5-banners?utm_source=Newsletter-August&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=HTML5-Banner-Solutions

We've been doing our Flash banners with Greensock for years, and many campaigns will want the same concept in both Flash and HTML. When that's the case, it's pretty easy to repurpose the tween code from Flash and apply it to a sprite sheet for the HTML version. However, now that we're going to stop doing Flash versions at all, I think it will make sense to ditch the greensock classes altogether and just do CSS transitions for our animation, when it's just a simple standard banner with things fading in and out in sequence.

css transitions

this is the way to go
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/CSS/Using_CSS_transitions

css easer
http://matthewlein.com/ceaser/

For me the best approach, though not the easiest, is using a sprite sheet and CSS transitions. This can make a very compact banner. Flash can export a sprite sheet with coordinates.

Works for position or opacity, and you can do some custom eases. 

"Flash in Free Fall"

https://www.admonsters.com/blog/opspov-flash-freefall

Flash disabled in Firefox today

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33520935

'Facebook's security chief has called for Adobe to set a date to kill off Flash'

yes we like banners

on Medium:
https://medium.com/@RickWebb/banner-fraud-doesn-t-matter-fc84413fe59c

animation reference

I keep ending up on this page for a css animation reference:
https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/a/animation/

Flash beats out Silverlight

http://flashdaily.net/post/123106336802/microsoft-edge-supports-flash-and-pdf-natively

sass animation

Good post; I'll be playing with this over the weekend.

http://williamanderson.io/blog/animation-timelines-with-sass.html

ad blocking cont'd

Martin Sorrell etc saying not all that much, but acknowledging that ad blockers are a real concern:
http://www.businessinsider.com/sir-martin-sorrell-jon-steinberg-dana-anderson-on-ad-blocking-2015-6

ISP-level blocking
http://www.stateofdigital.com/isp-level-ad-blocking/

GIF > Flash

I wouldn't have predicted the resurgence of GIF format animation as Flash departs -- http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/heres-why-gifs-are-back-style-and-bigger-ever-brands-165499

Gifs have ridiculously heavy file sizes, and for most animations would be more tedious to create than a Flash version. But they work on more devices!

Tracking you farther with Doubleclick

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-announces-cross-device-measurement-for-doubleclick-2015-6

Keeping track of you across different devices. Anonymously ?

When banner ads lose, Apple wins

Compelling article from text/plain:

http://textslashplain.com/2015/06/10/collateral-damage/

(ad blocking coming to mobile safari)
http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2015/06/10/ad-blocking-could-be-coming-to-apples-mobile-browser/

on Google's Flash to HTML5 ad banner conversion

This https://plus.google.com/+GoogleAds/posts/BWVyFHGUi9n seems to make people think that all Flash ads are being converted to HTML ads. Maybe some of them are, but the networks we're building for definitely don't allow the 428 kb Swiffy runtime as part of their 40k spec.

Google recently announced that Chrome will start defaulting to the behavior that Safari currently uses: plugin content will remain paused until the user clicks to play. This again will push advertisers away from continued use of Flash for desktop display.

Flash ads reaching the end

http://chrome.blogspot.com/2015/06/better-battery-life-for-your-laptop.html


also http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/05/chrome-pause-flash/

SWF version does not equal Flash Player version!

http://sleepydesign.blogspot.ie/2012/04/flash-swf-version-meaning.html

I'm always trying to find this, so I'm copying it here.

Compiler Option	Flash Player Version	AIR version
-swf-version=9	9.0.115.0	N/A
-swf-version=10	10.0, 10.1	1.5, 2.0
-swf-version=11	10.2	2.6
-swf-version=12	10.3	2.7
-swf-version=13	11.0	3
-swf-version=14	11.1	3.1
-swf-version=15	11.2	3.2
-swf-version=16	11.3	3.3
-swf-version=17	11.4	3.4
-swf-version=18	11.5	3.5
-swf-version=19	11.6	3.6
-swf-version=20	11.7	3.7
-swf-version=21	11.8	3.8
-swf-version=22	11.9	3.9
-swf-version=23	12	4
-swf-version=24	13	13
-swf-version=25	14	14
-swf-version=26	15	15
-swf-version=27	16	16
-swf-version=28	17	16

the state of animation 2014

This is a few months old, but still good.  I want to bookmark for myself it by posting here:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/11/18/the-state-of-animation-2014/

Rei Inamoto says: don't advertise on mobile!

We should use mobile as a way to provide service, not to push a message. Yes!

http://www.thedrum.com/news/2015/04/21/akqa-chief-creative-officer-rei-inamoto-why-brands-shouldn-t-advertise-mobile