I was really into this, until I ran into:

It appears your browser does not support 8 of the CSS3 properties used by Alice.js. Please use a WebKit-based browser like Chrome, Safari or the PlayBook Browser.

I could not figure out exactly what those properties are. I am running FF9a2 which should support pretty much everything Chrome does. The big thing FF lacked until 5 was the keyframe animations.[1][2][3] So not so useful to the world at large yet.

It does look like a nice library otherwise.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/CSS_animations

[2] http://www.impressivewebs.com/css3-browser-support/

[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435442

This reminds of the "optimized for IE/Netscape" messages that were common in the 90's.

3D CSS transforms were only introduced in Firefox 10, so that would be a good guess.

Note: Firefox 10 is still at least 12 weeks out: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases#Firefox_10

I get the same message in Firefox 10/Nightly.

So Flash effects come to CSS3. Good thing as a tech but I am still worried that these animations, and the @font-face devilry is going to be new "Big Web 2.0 Button" visual design disaster for design.

These tools in wrong hands makes baby Jesus cry. But then again, this is designer perspective. But really glad to see this logical progress.

I was thinking the same thing. This site is a pretty good example of "wrong hands"—a bunch of RIM employees.

People can make very ugly websites now without CSS3, I don't think it's anything to worry about.

This is just V0.1. We actually hard-coded the check because the code explicitly targets -webkit-* CSS properties internaly. It's also a very small project, and testing for Chrome, iOS and BlackBerry devices already created a lot of work for us. This will definitely improve in future versions and should be a thing of the past by the time we hit our 1.0 milestone (no date on that yet sorry).

As for the comment about design hell :) Yes, agreed. But when i see what has been done in Flash over the years, there has also been incredibly cool looking things done. That's worth that risk imho.

@ldhasson

Also, in a similar vein, checkout GFX: http://maccman.github.com/gfx/

This looks interesting and potentially useful, but that didn't stop the New York Times from making fun of it in this article about RIM:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/technology/research-in-mot...

The article only mentions the library in passing as a potential session. It's not taking a shot at Alice.js, it's taking a shot at RIM's failures with the PlayBook and current mobile devices.