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Lottie – Use after effects animations in web and native apps

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Re: Lottie – Use after effects animations in web and native apps

#61

Post by martin_ky »

josefrichter wrote: post #43

I hate to say it but man, I miss Flash!! The websites, interactions and animations we were able to create in it 20 years ago..! There is still nothing that comes close to productivity and quality of output. I am disappointed that Adobe butchered Flash and wasn’t able to come up with modern and mobile friendly version. The war with Apple should have pushed them forward. Instead they gave up.

I’m only familiar with Flash as a user, not as developer. I’m curious, what did Flash have, that you can’t readily do with JS and Canvas? Be as broad or specific as you like.

Re: Lottie – Use after effects animations in web and native apps

#62

Post by thomasikzelf »

elondaits wrote: post #50
k__ wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, mindset beat technology. ActionScript and Flex were more powerful than JavaScript and HTML, still the latter won because it was open.

Not just open. The standard underlying model in Flash is a stage with fixed dimensions. Great for arcade games and animations, but bad for responsive or being readable in various screen sizes. HTML can be a pain when you want to create sophisticated UI layouts, but by default it’s readable on all screens and reflows content automatically.

This is a shortcoming of many flash like tools that export to the web (such as unity or adobe animate). I am trying to solve this with https://moos.app It automatically works on all screen dimensions but is not as powerful as flash (yet).

Re: Lottie – Use after effects animations in web and native apps

#65

Post by throwanem »

k__ wrote: post #59
throwanem wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The appeal of AngularJS was more or less that, somewhat like Rails, it offered a One True Way that mostly worked pretty well. Overcomplicated by today's standards, sure, but remember that AngularJS was a decade ago, back when jQuery was still king and anything like architectural rigor on the frontend had yet to be imagined. Especially with a team made up mostly of folks with less JS experience, you could better susta…

Yes, I understood that. But at the time of Angular's release, ExtJS was already 3 years old.

They don't solve the same problem. ExtJS is a UI toolkit, AngularJS is more of an application framework - Angular doesn't provide complex controls, Ext doesn't provide a defined structure in which to build your code.

Re: Lottie – Use after effects animations in web and native apps

#67

Post by monkeynotes »

martin_ky wrote: post #61
josefrichter wrote: post #43

I hate to say it but man, I miss Flash!! The websites, interactions and animations we were able to create in it 20 years ago..! There is still nothing that comes close to productivity and quality of output. I am disappointed that Adobe butchered Flash and wasn’t able to come up with modern and mobile friendly version. The war with Apple should have pushed them forward. Instead they gave up.

I’m only familiar with Flash as a user, not as developer. I’m curious, what did Flash have, that you can’t readily do with JS and Canvas? Be as broad or specific as you like.

I'd say the major advantage was you had an IDE that had a canvas to draw on, a visual timeline to aide your animation, tweening, powerful scripting - much like Swift, and compilation (ship a self contained SWF binary).

For me the canvas was powerful, I could use a wacom to draw, tween motion between frames and visualize the whole thing quickly with playhead scrubbing, and keyframe tweaking etc.

I don't miss Flash but it would be really interesting to see how it would be used in today's mature webscape.

Re: Lottie – Use after effects animations in web and native apps

#68

Post by darepublic »

rikroots wrote: post #64

How accessible are Lottie animations? Can they include (keyboard accessible) hotspot links? ARIA markup? How much work would it take to make sure a Lottie animation respected user preferences like prefers-reduced-motion?

I don't think screen readers will attempt reading an svg. You can also wrap the svg tag in an element with a title or aria-describedby attribute

Re: Lottie – Use after effects animations in web and native apps

#69

Post by sreekotay »

k__ wrote: post #44
josefrichter wrote: post #43

I hate to say it but man, I miss Flash!! The websites, interactions and animations we were able to create in it 20 years ago..! There is still nothing that comes close to productivity and quality of output. I am disappointed that Adobe butchered Flash and wasn’t able to come up with modern and mobile friendly version. The war with Apple should have pushed them forward. Instead they gave up.

Again, mindset beat technology. ActionScript and Flex were more powerful than JavaScript and HTML, still the latter won because it was open.

Kinda. Flash mostly died because Jobs/iPhone killed it.

Re: Lottie – Use after effects animations in web and native apps

#70

Post by lekevicius »

circlingthesun wrote: post #46

Lottie files can be converted, with some limitations, to native SVG SMIL animations via bodymovin-to-smil [1]. With SMIL animations you save 66.6k worth of gzipped javascript [2] and your animations run before any javascript kicks in (great for above the fold animations). SMIL seems to have gotten little attention as Chrome intended to deprecate it 6 years ago [3]. That seems no longer be the case [3] and now that IE…

I love SMIL. Have been using it to craft custom SVG loaders for almost every brand I've worked with. Loader is usually much smaller than a gif, vector, animated 60 FPS, etc. So good.
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