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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

#71

Post by lekevicius »

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.

For me it was a combination of IDE that allowed very easily to merge different assets (text, vector graphics, sounds) with basic scripting and a timeline.

Now you kind of have to think in code, and architect the site as a whole, there's less creative impulse, or simply messing around to find something cool. This interactive messing around has to be visual, ideas should be easily copy-pastable, etc.

Because it was easy to experiment with the whole interactive media, and you didn't really have to worry about differences in player (no touch, no mobile, player was independent of browser), you could create wild stuff in very short amount of time, and everyone could play with it in the same way.

I loved Flash. Sure, it wasn't accessible, wasn't SEO-friendly or searchable or linkable, and had no future in mobile, but it was a magical creative canvas quite unlike anything available now.

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

#72

Post by specialist »

sreekotay wrote: post #69
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.

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

Yes and: Adobe were turrible stewards. So much neglect, unrealized potential.

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

#73

Post by simion314 »

throwanem wrote: post #56
k__ wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood the appeal of Angular. The first time I heard about it was on a JavaScript meetup, where a guy praised it as the best that ever happened to JS. He said multiple times "Yes, and we had some issues... but they came from the fact that we didn't do it like Angular intended, when we rewrote as the maintainers explained, it worked!" I never touched it. Went from ExtJS4, to Ember.js, to React and then I s…

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…

I would disagree, there was no one true way, there are a few ways to do a slect for example, like you can use ng-options or use ng-repat for a li. There is also a sure way to have developers created stupid code where the 2 ways bindings will fire changes into an infinite loop. As an example a simple dropdown could just be like

for a bit more complex stuff you have have attributes like

and for custom stuff you provide your own render function

With this architecture 99% of cases will not requiere custom code, just setting some attributes, and the 1% you create your function that paints the item in the list. For all you get for free all the DropDown functionality, like keyboard shortcuts(arrow keys, Enter) . accessibility, all the events(before open, open, opened, before close, closed, hover ) in angular world if you are not super lucky to get pro developers with good angular experience you get a giant mess. They added components much later , not sure what was in angular team head not creating the component stuff from the beginning (I inherited a code base before components were invented in angular)

Edit: maybe angular was better then jQuery or whatever stuff was there in JS world but my issue is the guys that created it appears that they never created desktop or mobile apps, is like soem Google devs in their free time invented this shit from scratch with ZERO experience in GUI toolits, in fact I am wondering how big is the ratio of quality code /total code Google devs are creating. I hope their Fushia team has some competent experienced developers in the team.

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

#74

Post by throwanem »

simion314 wrote: post #73
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…

I would disagree, there was no one true way, there are a few ways to do a slect for example, like you can use ng-options or use ng-repat for a li. There is also a sure way to have developers created stupid code where the 2 ways bindings will fire changes into an infinite loop. As an example a simple dropdown could just be like for a bit more complex stuff you have have attributes like and for custom stuff you provide…

> in angular world if you are not super lucky to get pro developers with good angular experience you get a giant mess

True, but you only needed one good Angular dev, in a senior or lead role, to avoid that. I had the enormous privilege of getting to be that person a few years back, and maybe that colors my interpretation a little.

> They added components much later , not sure what was in angular team head not creating the component stuff from the beginning

My impression is that Angular 2 grew components largely in response to and because of React. The concept wasn't precisely new, but React did formulate it in a way that can be fairly called novel.

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

#75

Post by makomk »

udbhavs wrote: post #2

Posted this because I wanted to start a discussion on the ecosystem and workflows around Lottie and animations on the web. Here are some alternative programs I found that can export Lottie files: https://www.haikuanimator.com/ https://glaxnimate.mattbas.org/

Recent versions of Synfig can apparently export to Lottie too, with some limitations, but that was mostly designed for anime-imspired character animation rather than UI stuff and I'm not sure all the features intended for animating characters works correctly.

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

#76

Post by CommanderData »

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.

It truly did allow for very artistic interactive assets. The ide, tooling, actionscript were quite revolutionary.

Today it could be a paradox of choice situation, for an aspiring creator to produce anything today would require them to pick up a bundle of technologies.

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

#77

Post by simion314 »

throwanem wrote: post #74
simion314 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would disagree, there was no one true way, there are a few ways to do a slect for example, like you can use ng-options or use ng-repat for a li. There is also a sure way to have developers created stupid code where the 2 ways bindings will fire changes into an infinite loop. As an example a simple dropdown could just be like for a bit more complex stuff you have have attributes like and for custom stuff you provide…

> in angular world if you are not super lucky to get pro developers with good angular experience you get a giant mess True, but you only needed one good Angular dev, in a senior or lead role, to avoid that. I had the enormous privilege of getting to be that person a few years back, and maybe that colors my interpretation a little. > They added components much later , not sure what was in angular team head not creatin…

Componets/Widgets were super old in Desktop world so React did not invented them. This is why I wonder if angular devs ever ever did any GUI development before creating angular, or maybe angular was just a simple toy and for some reason it grew too much.

I can't find 1 good thing to say about angular1(version <=1.5) compared to Qt,WPF,Flex4 . Let me know if you worked with that old version any good thing about it (that is not it is a bit better then bad jQuery code)

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

#78

Post by simion314 »

throwanem wrote: post #65
k__ wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Angular doesn't provide complex controls,

It did not provide simple controls either, no basic DropDown or DataGrid,ListBox. It only made super easy to make Hellpo world apps with the 2-way data bindings and that is all, when things get complex angular can't also gets super complex.

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

#80

Post by root_axis »

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.

Flash did not integrate well with the rest of the page and was an utter nightmare with respect to accessibility and responsive design. It was also buggy, prone to memory leaks and crashing, and required the end-user to install or update arbitrary code on their machine, with all the headache and security implications that necessitates. Support and performance was also horrible on mobile when it was available at all. Flash was pretty and had decent tooling, but it sucked pretty hard compared to today's options.
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