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Introducing Lottie: Airbnb's tool for adding animations to native apps

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Re: Introducing Lottie: Airbnb's tool for adding animations to native apps

#81

Post by qq66 »

coldcode wrote: post #70

I wonder though whether users really want lots of fancy animations. Our apps have way too many that add absolutely nothing to the usability, and in fact take away from it as you have to wait until things are done sliding around the screen. It's not that some animation is a bad thing, but give people such easy ways to make everything move and dance and you wind up with a modern version of 1990's websites. Of course it…

Extremely skillful and judicious use of animations can make an UI 50% better, and hamfisted use of animations can make a UI 90% worse.

Re: Introducing Lottie: Airbnb's tool for adding animations to native apps

#82

Post by qq66 »

coldcode wrote: post #70

I wonder though whether users really want lots of fancy animations. Our apps have way too many that add absolutely nothing to the usability, and in fact take away from it as you have to wait until things are done sliding around the screen. It's not that some animation is a bad thing, but give people such easy ways to make everything move and dance and you wind up with a modern version of 1990's websites. Of course it…

Extremely skillful and judicious use of animations can make an UI 50% better, and hamfisted use of animations can make a UI 90% worse.

Re: Introducing Lottie: Airbnb's tool for adding animations to native apps

#83

Post by enra »

Kiro wrote: post #80

If you need After Effects anyway, why not just export a GIF or something? What's the benefit of rendering it in real-time?

Gifs work, but if you want to make them high frame rate and high resolution, they can get quite large in filesize, especially if you want to support transparency (and still it wont support alpha transparency). Just on an iOS app, you would have to export the animation gif in 1x, 2x, 3x resolutions.

Lottie uses json file that contains svgs and the animation, which can be compressed quite well, always display in the right resolution and whatever size you desire.

Re: Introducing Lottie: Airbnb's tool for adding animations to native apps

#84

Post by nthState »

I wonder how this will affect Marcus Eckert’s Squall. Squall, a paid plug-in vs a free library. I find it annoying when things like this happens, an independent developer works on something for ages and tries to make some money, then a large company releases something pretty much the same for free.

Note: I'm not taking anything away from either product, both are super amazing.

gah/ just my $0.02

Re: Introducing Lottie: Airbnb's tool for adding animations to native apps

#85

Post by skynode »

nthState wrote: post #84

I wonder how this will affect Marcus Eckert’s Squall. Squall, a paid plug-in vs a free library. I find it annoying when things like this happens, an independent developer works on something for ages and tries to make some money, then a large company releases something pretty much the same for free. Note: I'm not taking anything away from either product, both are super amazing. gah/ just my $0.02

I'm currently facing the same dilemma as an indie developer working on a data analysis/data visualization product. Companies like Tableau and co can afford to squeeze the juice of indie developers by offering similar featured products for free. I try not to get discouraged though. I think the field is really large and there are quite a ton of ways to make inroads these days but I think it's also important to play in large enough markets, so better to play in the $120bn+ data analytics market than some $100m market with one well-nourished, fast moving white shark.

Re: Introducing Lottie: Airbnb's tool for adding animations to native apps

#86

Post by bitprior »

mxstbr wrote: post #23

This is huge. I did my first internship at a company that was half animators making huge TV ads you have seen, and half web devs/designers that made interactive (web) apps.[0] Lottie is, without a doubt, solving a huge problem in the industry. Previously, engineers were often stuck bolting animations and transients onto static PSDs, or designers fighting to communicate what they wanted an animation to be like. This c…

Hey, I think it's worth directing people to checkout Mt. Mograph[0] and from there looking of motions on Dribbler for inspiration.

I recently moved from working on media (largely motion graphics) into a more technical field of study. Mt. Mograph helped flesh out my after effects knowledge to improve my motion graphics.

(No affiliation whatsoever, I just find his videos great, first one is a bit long while he gets his bearings)

[0] https://YouTube.com/mtmograph

Re: Introducing Lottie: Airbnb's tool for adding animations to native apps

#87

Post by intoverflow2 »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #64

I associate AE with video production -- is it actually suitable for vector animation aimed at web/mobile?

AE is a huge and extensive application, truly the lesser known gem of Adobe and what almost all non-3D animation is created with these days.

Re: Introducing Lottie: Airbnb's tool for adding animations to native apps

#89

Post by buba447 »

richforrester wrote: post #73
buba447 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After Effects isn't a video manipulation tool. Video manipulation is one of its capabilities, it is also capable of motion graphics and animating vector shapes. This library works off the vector shape side of after effects.

Yes, it's been built towards motion graphics. Just as Photoshop has been geared towards web design over the years. It was originally a post processing tool. Hence the name. After Effects. Which is why this whole thing seems so similar to me.

I see what ya mean! Its always felt like some weird mix of illustrator and photoshop to me. Strange to how PHOTOshop moved the graphic way and the lightroom became the defacto photo editor. Guess that's just software evolution for ya :)

Re: Introducing Lottie: Airbnb's tool for adding animations to native apps

#90

Post by buba447 »

72mena wrote: post #65
buba447 wrote: post #4

Author of the iOS side of things here. Feel Free to ask any questions!

My questions may be off-topic (maybe more fit for an AMA with the design/engineering Airbnb team). First of all, thank you for making this an open-source project. I've noticed Airbnb has been very open with the design community about the internal processes and tools, whereas most companies keep their employees under NDAs. So my 2 questions are: 1. Did your team have to advocate for budget to create these tools, to wr…

Great questions! 1. Lottie started as a ios hackathon project with our motion designer and me. The idea was to just try and get something out of after effect and simply moving on screen. We ended up getting quite a bit further and wanted to keep working on it. For a while we were working on it in our spare time. Airbnb is a great place for open source. Open sourcing code is encouraged by the company. So we made a roadmap of what we wantsd to accomplish, a list of benefits and gains, along with a wish list of future possibilities for lottie and took it to our managers. Basically we pitched it. We also looped in a few product teams and found a handful of small places to use lottie. We also brought on an Abdroid engineer. After this we got approval to move forward with lottie in a 30/70 type fashion. Over all we spent nearly a year, from hackathin to release, on Lottie. We checked out what others were working on and reached out to bodymovin and squall. I cant remember if we reached out to adobe.
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