coryhudson

Thanks for the input Tim, I really appreciate your feedback! You raise some great points that are worthy of conversation, so here are my 2 cents on each of them: 1) Most major ad serving vendors seem to be providing CDN hosting and file size exemption for both GSAP and CreateJs. (e.g. DoubleClick, AdWords, Sizmek, etc.) That said, this practice is not universally adopted as of yet, however the IAB is now strongly encouraging vendors and publishers to provide CDN hosted libraries, so I would expect for this file size exemption to become more and more common across the digital ad industry. 2) Regarding retina support, this should be approached in a strategic manner in order to avoid the unnecessary bloating of the overall file size associated with your image assets. You can sometimes avoid having to double the dimensions of photographic images that are not the focal point of the ad experience (e.g. photographic background image). Conversely, photographic imagery that is the focal point of the ad experience or graphical elements that have sharp, crisp edges such as logos, line artwork and text will most likely always need to be doubled in dimensions because the difference in visual quality is very apparent and noticeable (if you are using images rather than SVG for these assets). Testing your ad on high DPI devices will allow you to determine which graphics will need to be double-sized or which will not. With experience you will be able to identify these scenarios readily. This could also be determined by what type of results are acceptable to a particular client. 3) I personally believe that it comes down to who is creating the ad and their particular skill set and preferences. If a designer who is not comfortable coding animations and instead prefers to use a visual timeline-based tool then using Animate obviously makes a lot of sense for them. Animate would also seem to be a good fit for Flash designers or developers who wish to continue to leverage their existing Flash skills to build HTML5 ads. When designers and developers are working together, Animate can also serve as a content creation tool for the designers who would lay out the ad and any timeline based animations before handing it off to a developer who could then introduce advanced or complex functionality through hand-coding within the Animate HTML output. Lastly, even folks who are comfortable using both Animate as well as hand-coding with the DOM and GSAP (like myself) it comes down to the provided assets and required functionality of the project that will determine which approach will allow me to produce the best quality results in the shortest amount of time possible. 4) Because Adobe has scraped Edge Animate entirely and aligned all of it’s resources behind improving Adobe Animate, I believe that it is well positioned to become the most widely used visual IDE for ad creators. Because of Adobe Animate’s resources, strategy, wide distribution and growing adoption I think that it will quickly become a very common and familiar output that most vendors, publishers, developers, etc. will be very comfortable accepting and working with.