Founder and lead developer Jonathan Deutsch will give the mile high view of Tumult Hype at the Hype Conference on October 8th. He’ll cover the past, present, and may offer a sneak peek at the future of Hype.

Tell me a bit about yourself and what brought you to Hype:

I’ve been with Hype since the beginning – the very first time ‘build’ was pressed in Xcode!

Hype was started based on two thoughts:

1: HTML5, not Flash, would be the path to making browser-based animations/interactivity in the future (aka now), and 2: There should be visual tools for visual browser effects. I saw these needs first-hand when I was working on an animated website documenting a recent vacation to Europe. Like any good engineer, instead of spending 5 hours hand coding the site, I decided to spend 5 years making a tool that could make the site for me!
What’s most exciting about doing what you do?

I love seeing what people create with Tumult Hype – I’d say it is probably the same feeling a brush maker has when they see a painting made with their brushes. Animated Children’s books are especially heart warming. Beyond the content itself though, the engineer part of me is especially excited when we get a document from a user (say as part of a support question) and seeing a new feature put to use. There’s some amount of features we can intuit will be adopted, but others (like Physics, Symbols, Custom Behaviors, etc.) are a bit of a gamble to develop. They can take a long time, and due to complexity were aren’t sure if the utility will be worth the learning curve. So when I see these features being used to create something new, I know the gamble paid off.

Can you share a hint about what you’ll be talking about at the conference?

I’ll be talking about the evolution of Hype – where it has been, where it is, and where Hype is going. I’m planning to include a sneak peek at our upcoming release.

Included in this will be discussions of general trends for web animation and interactivity. Browsers and devices are becoming much more powerful and this is opening up lots of doors to make much more expressive animations. Also, the browser isn’t the only area Hype can be used, so I’m going to talk about app use cases and prototyping.

Anything else you might want to share with attendees about yourself?

A little known fact is that I love the thrill of on-the-spot challenges. Often when I give a talk an audience member will ask, “can I do [some sufficiently difficult effect] with Hype?” Most of the time the answer is going to be “yes,” and it is fun for me to figure out how to do it live and demonstrate to them. A year ago at the iBooks Author conference an attendee asked about replicating Photoshop filter functionality – through some quick timelines animating CSS Filter Effects and On Drag actions I was able to do this task in a couple of minutes. This won them over to using Hype for future projects. So I’m secretly hoping to get hard questions at the conference!

Meet Jonathan and more speakers & attendees at the Hype Conference on October 8th.