Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

trangram.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 257 posts

Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

#51

Post by jonplackett »

junto wrote: post #13

Back in the day I used to do quite a lot of Macromedia Flash work. It’s uncannily similar but a modern take. I’ve often wondered why no one has come up with a new product in this space. I think the long term demise of Flash has put off anyone even trying. There are so many great uses for animations on the web, even if we don’t need full blown user interfaces of them and intro screens like we did back in 2002. Great j…

Absolutely agree. The interface was what made flash so good because it let non-coders make things.

So sad that Adobe were unwilling / unable to just make it output html5 instead of swf. But Adobe so where software goes to die so…

Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

#52

Post by weinzierl »

A good SVG animation tool is dearly missing. I wish Inkscape could do it or there was an Inkscape-like animation tool, that does not hide but rather embraces the underlying SVG code.

Can you tell how you approach to this is? Can you just export SVG animations or even import and edit without destroying the original structure?

Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

#53

Post by asteroidz »

5- wrote: post #18

very nice! unless i'm missing something, you don't support export to any vector and/or animated formats besides your own?

Certainly a bit disappointing that Lottie or SVG format export doesn't exist. Hopefully a work in progress?

Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

#54

Post by [deleted] »

self_awareness wrote: post #38

Looks good, although I'm a little bit sad about this web application trend. I mean I get the ease of deployment -- just open the webpage and use it. But this application is just temporary; it won't exist after 15 years; it will change into something else, or it will cease to exist. It will be impossible to use older version of it. It won't be possible to preserve it, emulate it. If the server is off, the application…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

#55

Post by Mackser »

This looks really well done! I was able to create a simple animation easily even though I don't know anything about animation software.

By the way, your "Features" page is really well made. I would showcase those features on the homepage. I didn't find the list of features until I clicked the link in one of your comments on HN.

You can also make your project more appealing on the homepage by including a looping demo animation (to see what's possible) and a screenshot of the tool.

Best of luck with the project!

Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

#56

Post by mittermayr »

One quick comment: I was threatened and on the brink of being sued by one of Facebook's bigger law firms, because my domain was called "***gram.com" — I went through a couple of calls with them, and they confirmed that the only issue was the use of the word "gram". I tried to stick to my guns, knowing they had nothing (legally) on me, but eventually had to give in once they told me to research the ongoing cases they have with all the other domain owners (which you can all find online). Some of which have been going through lawyer-warfare for over three years (at the time). They basically said, if I have the power to sustain this, they would sue and we'll clear this in court, if I don't want to go through this, I should back off and use a different domain.

So, while I hate saying this, be warned, I was warned and ignored it, and eventually, no matter how tall you feel, that call may come quicker than you think. Keep a second domain around ready to go, make sure you can rebrand. Just my word of (super sad) advice.

Looks great though!

Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

#57

Post by illwrks »

I’ve not looked at the tool, but are animations driven by CSS, and if so do you embed the CSS into the SVG? Where I work we’re looking at SVG animation tools for some graphics and the majority appear to be lottie-like tools dependent on JavaScript and other plugins which we can’t use.

Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

#58

Post by mittermayr »

self_awareness wrote: post #38

Looks good, although I'm a little bit sad about this web application trend. I mean I get the ease of deployment -- just open the webpage and use it. But this application is just temporary; it won't exist after 15 years; it will change into something else, or it will cease to exist. It will be impossible to use older version of it. It won't be possible to preserve it, emulate it. If the server is off, the application…

I agree, this is also going to get much worse. I recently dipped back into some of the younger SaaS communities (Twitter is particularly crazy) and it's just madness. They make something, (ab)use anything they can find to push this in front of people and promote it, and if it doesn't throw cash within the minute, it will be left for dead. I'd even argue that some of these tools have a lifetime of a month or less. With AI, this is typically the moment when they run out of their first OpenAI top up and start to abandon.

Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

#59

Post by lukko »

Well done for shipping! I'm really impressed by the tool - it's intuitive and like a very light-weight After Effects.

I think just re-designing the landing page would make a huge difference, very quickly. I think currently it lets down what is a well-crafted design / animation tool. Get rid of the white and teal, and the default system fonts. The looom site is a lovely example (https://www.iorama.studio/looom).

Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

#60

Post by jarek-foksa »

illwrks wrote: post #57

I’ve not looked at the tool, but are animations driven by CSS, and if so do you embed the CSS into the SVG? Where I work we’re looking at SVG animation tools for some graphics and the majority appear to be lottie-like tools dependent on JavaScript and other plugins which we can’t use.

For pure SVG-based animations you should take a look at Boxy SVG: https://boxy-svg.com/blog/21
Post reply on HN