Tao Tajima – WebGL and GreenSock Animation
Extracting one part of a conversation I had on Reddit with someone who's worked with GreenSock --<p>"GSAP is fairly standard on commercial sites. It’s the most mature and cross tested animation option, but it’s best features aren’t free. I’d argue there’s a good reason for that though, because the codebase is pretty impressive and can’t be cheap to maintain.<p>Most people say the biggest advantage of GSAP is the timeline. When paired with SVGs (and using GSAP’s morph plugin) there’s some pretty crazy and unexplored UI orientated options that become very possible. I rarely have a client with a budget to go there, but why use another tool that can’t do such amazing SVG manipulations in real time and synced to other movement on the screen?<p>I cannot overstate how powerful that is.<p>But the bottom line is that not enough “ux” folk are good enough with JavaScript to really be creative with GSAP. So it’s mostly front Enders that use it or propose it in meetings.<p>Also I’m not 100% sure... but I think I recall reading somewhere that a lot of the software solutions trying to make web animation “easy” for designers, use GSAP under the hood. So I look as GSAP a lot like D3. Since they’re advanced/enterprise solutions, and not easy to use (but not hard at all for proper programmers), there’s a lot of attempts to make it easier with libraries built on top of their bases through licensing."