Microsoft Ports Popular iOS Game, Cut the Rope, to HTML5

LAS VEGAS—During Steve Ballmer's CES Keynote on Monday night, Microsoft showed a newly coded HTML5 version of popular iOS game, Cut the Rope. Microsoft partnered with ZeptoLab and Pixel Lab to bring the game to all Web browsers using HTML5. The game is free to play at www.cuttherope.ie, with 27 levels available. The game is among both PCMag.com's Best 50 iPhone Apps and 50 Best Android Apps. It also has a rare five-star user rating with over 11,000 votes in the iTunes App Store.

There's been a lot of talk about HTML5 in the past year, whether it's Apple touting the Web browser technology's ability to replace Adobe's Flash plugin for interactive content or Google touting a new feature of Chrome. HTML5 is supposed to be a "standard," and its features are supported in different degrees in each of the major Web browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. But seldom have we actually seen HTML5 content that actually works perfectly in all. Apple, Google, and Microsoft, and Mozilla all have demo pages of HTML5 examples that only run perfectly in their own browser.

HTML5 compatibility is Important for MS since its Metro-style apps will tap the IE engine to run apps built for this side of Windows 8, which will also include the "Desktop," or, what we've come to know as Windows till now. And the Metro-style browser, like iOS, will be "plug-in free," according to Microsoft, which is code for, "no Adobe Flash capability." The team behind Cut the Rope for the Web has put up an engaging Behind the Scenes page aimed at developers.

The page describes Cut the Rope for the Web as "an authentic translation of the game for the web, showcasing some of the best that HTML5 has to offer: canvas-rendered graphics, browser-based audio and video, CSS3 styling and the personality of WOFF fonts." The post also notes that porting the 15,000 lines of the iOS game's Objective C code to JavaScript while maintaining the game's personality, physics, and quality was a "daunting task." It meant moving from a compiled, object-oriented language to what started as a simple scripting language.

I tried the game in each of the major browsers mentioned above, and it performed well in each, but some of the levels require the user to "pin" the site to the Taskbar, which is only possible with Internet Explorer. I also tried it on Windows 8's Metro-style Internet Explorer 10, where, expectedly, it ran perfectly, and in full screen. The Behind the Scenes page notes that, once a developer has coded a Web app using HTML5, converting it to a Windows 8 Metro app is a snap.

But Microsoft isn't the only platform software company taking that strategy: Google's Chrome OS uses pretty much the same one, in which all apps are Web apps. Whether the world is willing to give up natively compiled code for Web apps remains to be seen, but Cut the Rope is nevertheless an impressive start.

For more from Michael, follow him on Twitter @mikemuch.