Looking for a way to convert Adobe Illustrator assets to HTML5 Canvas ready markup?

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I’m not sure how well this works, but the idea certainly has lots of potential. As we’re all waiting for the HTML5 tools to mature (and some to come to market), I saw that the MIX Online team has come up with a doozy. Looking at a blog post from Thomas Lewis, titled Introducing the Ai to Canvas Plug-In, he describes a capability that designers are going to like – the ability to export vector and bitmap artwork into HTML5 canvas markup and coding. This will get someone a head start into developing interesting HTML5 experiences, like we’ve seen on the Beauty Of The Web site. And Thomas calls out several sites that have leveraged the tool already, and links to them. And if Michael Swanson is involved, this deserves a closer look. (Not to mention, the output of the Mix Labs crew is sooooooo cool. Just check out one example, like the Archivist, a Twitter search tracker that stores it’s results in Azure..)

Here’s some of Thomas’ words about the Adobe plug-in:

With the release of browsers that support HTML5 and related technologies, we will see web designers and developers build web apps that take advantage of the canvas tag to add drawing capabilities without an add-in to the browser. We wanted to build a tool that allowed you to take a drawing application you are familiar with and make it easy to export to canvas.

We are calling it the Ai->Canvas Plug-In .

The Ai->Canvas Plug-In enables Adobe Illustrator to export vector and bitmap artwork directly to an HTML5 canvas element that can be rendered in a canvas-enabled browser. The plug-in provides drawing, animation and coding options such as events so that you can build interactive, well-designed canvas-based web apps.

The Ai->Canvas Plug-In is free and runs on both Windows and Mac….

That’s cool.

I’m guessing that someone at Apple will love this, so they can build cool stuff for their Safari HTML5 demo site.  For some reason, they won’t let me run IE9 on that site. Hmmmm, very open.

Would love to hear if you try the plug-in out.