Believe the Hype: Former Apple engineers release Flash-killing HTML5 authoring tool

9to5 Staff | May 24 2011 - 7:04 am PT

For all the talk of HTML5, web developers nowadays are still doomed to hard-coding pretty HTML5 websites. Deciding enough is enough, two engineers left Apple to found Tumult, a Y Combinator-funded startup. Their goal: Address a chronic shortage of decent HTML5 authoring tools. What, you didn’t think Adobe’s Creative Suite is the be all end all of web development?

The result of their undertaking is Hype, a brand new Mac application taking the pain out of creating eye-catching animations on the web that don’t require the Flash plug-in. Jonathan Deutsch, one of the co-founders and former engineering manager for the Mail.app backend, explains in an interview with Paul Hontz’s The Startup Foundry:

At one point after a trip to Europe, I wanted to make a photo website that would be as nice as a beautifully bound photo album, and use lots of effects. Coding this with HTML5 would have been a nightmare. There had to be a better way, and that’s how the idea for Hype was born.

The $30 download (limited introductory pricing) is already the top-grossing program on the Mac App Store. Deutsch also shared interesting anecdotes about the perks of working at Apple…

For starters, each hire gets new hardware from the company (free of charge or discounted? He didn’t tell). He also tells that “at Apple the question is often ‘how many times have you worked here?'” because the company hires a lot of clever people who at some point discover the entrepreneur within and leave for their own startups. As many startups fail before even taking off, some of the people turn to their former employer.

He also credited HTML5 adoption and Javascript optimizations to the work Apple has done with the open-sourced WebKit rendering engine. “It’s great to see HTML5 as a new platform, and Apple deserves a lot of credit”, he said. WebKit is today the platform of choice for the vast majority of mobile browser, unlike on desktops where the fragmentation between WebKit on one side and Microsoft’s and Mozilla’s proprietary rendering platforms on the other complicates web development.