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Show HN: Create animations by dragging an element with your mouse

animatize.com

21–30 of 59 posts

Re: Show HN: Create animations by dragging an element with your mouse

#21

Didn't you also start doing 31 launches in January? How's that been going? I see animatize is one of your projects. https://31launches.com/

I did.

It's been one of my better decisions. I have so many projects that are 80% complete that I've just been too embarrassed to post.

31 launches is meant to help me get past that fear/hesitation.

But creating Animatize took 18 hours of my week last week and just completely wore me out. I had to take 5 days off just to recuperate and get back on track.

Re: Show HN: Create animations by dragging an element with your mouse

#22

This is great. Do you have plans to expand the controls or animation options? For example, adding pauses, or additional animation types like scale or rotate. Thanks for sharing this project.

Seeing this project get some traction has made me hopeful about its future, so I might just do that!

Finding an intuitive interface for adding advanced features should be interesting, for sure.

Re: Show HN: Create animations by dragging an element with your mouse

#23
post #11

This is really cool. As others have said I'd love to see an option to output a GIF and additional animation options.

What animation options (other than GIF export) are you craving? I've heard pausing, deleting frames, and rotating so far.

I'll probably work on the GIF export next, but I'm low on time this month since I'm trying to get 31 projects out the door [0].

[0] https://31launches.com

Re: Show HN: Create animations by dragging an element with your mouse

#24
post #6

Love it, but this needs to be able to output GIFs I can easily copy and share on slack, etc. (Unless I missed out how to do that entirely?)

Yes, that's next on the list.

Just trying to get a proof-of-concept out with this first version.

Btw, if anyone knows of a good way to stitch together two images into a gif by passing in coordinates (even a paid API for this), I'd love to know about it.

Re: Show HN: Create animations by dragging an element with your mouse

#25
post #10

This is what ergonomics looks like. Even small children can convey the movement of actors through space using similar techniques. It's an extremely natural way to communicate how something moves. But we have lost that basic idea in favor of very precise animation tools and the complexity that comes with them.

I've noticed that "animating with mouse" has become an animation style of it's own on youtube recently. Mostly in comedic contexts which does look quite charming but in education videos as well which seems to be very functional. An easy way to achieve this style in video is to fire up gimp (or some other image editor) and hide cursor in the recording software.

This sounds like a great real-time teaching style.

Can you point us to the videos you're talking about?

Re: Show HN: Create animations by dragging an element with your mouse

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed that "animating with mouse" has become an animation style of it's own on youtube recently. Mostly in comedic contexts which does look quite charming but in education videos as well which seems to be very functional. An easy way to achieve this style in video is to fire up gimp (or some other image editor) and hide cursor in the recording software.

This sounds like a great real-time teaching style. Can you point us to the videos you're talking about?

This meme[1] is pretty famous but doesn't hide the cursor or anything. There are a few others like it, I've never seen an educational video done like that though

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-fXTRHApRc

Re: Show HN: Create animations by dragging an element with your mouse

#28
post #10

This is what ergonomics looks like. Even small children can convey the movement of actors through space using similar techniques. It's an extremely natural way to communicate how something moves. But we have lost that basic idea in favor of very precise animation tools and the complexity that comes with them.

This reminds me of a video game I played as a kid. Opening Night. You could create plays, dialog, etc and have your characters act for you. You could just choose where they walked and then had a bunch of emotes they could do.

So fun to be so creative making plays!

Re: Show HN: Create animations by dragging an element with your mouse

#30
post #6

Love it, but this needs to be able to output GIFs I can easily copy and share on slack, etc. (Unless I missed out how to do that entirely?)

SVG would be cool too :)

If SVG is supported as an input type too (good for rotating/scaling), then the output of the tool could all be editable text.

I guess building an IDE for that wouldn't make sense, but it would be nice to generate an HTML page that has all of the assets defined within it, as a single file.

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