Just a small historical revision - Netscape was losing a point of market share per month in mid 1997 - even before IE4 came out, because of Microsoft enforcing IE as the OEM browser on most desktop PCs
I haven't spent much time with hype, but they have some nice features like the record my action (neat). They also hide a lot of the details of what's going on under the covers with their JavaScript library.
With Animator, we've tried to minimize the distance between what you do in the tool and what you'd do with hand-built animations. This means that the outputted source is relatively easy to tweak as you see fit. Animations can also be fitted relatively easily into your existing page source by specifying classes etc.
When you nest an animation, for example, you're nesting a DIV under the covers. You can manually set z-indices, so the animation doesn't blow up the rest of your page. You can manually enter rgba colors into the color pickers etc.
The #1 target for Animator is mobile animations on iPhone/iPad/Android, so we only do CSS Animations, which are hardware accelerated on iOS and should be soon on Android. We could do a JavaScript polyfill like Hype, but JavaScript animations are frankly terrible on mobile because JavaScript timers are really crappy. (That said, we'll probably do a JavaScript polyfill at some stage if people really want them.)
Some other things about Animator - nested animations. Nesting is a really key tool to have - you can do some brilliant animations without a lot of work with nesting.
That said, it's great to have another entrant in the HTML5 animation category. Welcome to the party Tumultco!
Hi John. I work at Sencha. We haven't spoken yet, but I think I have to respond to the "disservice" comment because frankly it seems a little uncharitable (and uncharacteristic of your usual even-handed demeanor) given that Sencha is promoting jQuery use by funding Jonathan Stark's work on jQTouch including work to port jQTouch to Android.
We intend to continue to fund jQTouch work because we want to support all those developers (thousands at least) that have chosen jQTouch (and jQuery) as their platform. We will continue to support jQTouch ports to more phones and more browsers as additional browsers and platforms emerge (like the Blackberry Torch) that can support a minimal rich application experience.
As you've noted in the past, Sencha Touch takes a different approach than what you're planning to do with jQuery Mobile. It's ok to differ, but we wouldn't characterize it as a "disservice". Our belief (right or wrong) is that few people will use applications (and I emphasize that word) unless they can produce experiences that can compete with native. We've had ten years of mobile web sites with static, unresponsive, high latency user experiences that haven't interested or excited people. We want to move on from that.
Today, iOS, Android and the Blackberry Torch can support web apps that compete with native experiences (woohoo!), but by the end of the year, we'll see phones from Nokia (and more from RIM and maybe even some from Microsoft) with good HTML5/CSS3 support and fast processors and GPU's that allow everyone to have rich app experiences regardless of their choice of carrier or their geography. With the rise of $30 HTML5 Android phones from China, we see this as inexorable.
Our two projects are making different assumptions about what will most interest (and excite) end-users. I hope we can maintain an engaged (and polite) discussion as we walk these paths. Feel free to email me, would love to chat more to provide more context around our decisions. We'll also put together a blog post soon on why we're doing what we are.