from Hacker News

Keyframes: Delivering scalable, high-quality animations to mobile clients

by theelfismike on 11/22/16, 4:11 PM with 139 comments

  • by lozzle on 11/22/16, 4:52 PM

    Hey, everyone!

    I'm one of the developers at Facebook who worked on this library since its conception! Really excited to be able to share this library today! I'll be checking up here periodically and can help answer any technical questions that you have!

  • by echelon on 11/22/16, 4:26 PM

    This is really slick, and I'm going to investigate using it for the Donald Trump animation on jungle.horse.

    The license [1] doesn't look to be as encumbered as some of Facebook's other open source licenses, but does include a clause I found to be strange:

    > provided Your Software does not consist solely of the Software

    So if I'm reading this correctly, it means only Facebook can redistribute this software? Wat.

    [1] https://github.com/facebookincubator/Keyframes/blob/master/L...

  • by zigzigzag on 11/22/16, 5:49 PM

    I was totally down with this - a tight, efficient vector graphics format with After Effects integration, super - up until the point they said these animations were JSON files.

    Huh?

    Didn't I just read a whole blog post saying that one of their requirements was fast loading from disk, small bandwidth usage, etc? And that's what justified creating an entirely new image format from scratch, not something the internet is really suffering a shortage of already?

    I know JSON is fashionable but that ending just seems kind of ridiculous. What's wrong with a binary format? Use Cap'n'Proto and mmap it! Saying numbers represented as text compresses well was the icing on the cake. No shit!

  • by dharma1 on 11/22/16, 4:29 PM

    tl;dr - A plugin/library for exporting vector animations from After Effects and using them easily in iOS/Android apps.

    Previous options were exporting SVG animations, rendering to bitmap spritesheets or png sequences - or having to write a spec for the AE animation and recreate it in iOS/Android.

  • by wiradikusuma on 11/22/16, 4:40 PM

    Correct me if I'm wrong. It sounds like Keyframes is like "Flash runtime", the differences are you author your animation in After Effects, and the output is JSON (instead of SWF).

  • by valine on 11/22/16, 4:29 PM

    This is a powerful idea. I've looked for tools to do this exact thing. I'm the sole animator on a team of software developers and currently when I want to create an animation in an iOS app I usually start by mocking up the animation in a tool like after effects, and then recreate that animation using my graph editor as reference in core animation. Svg works well for storing shapes. Having a similar standard for storing animation curves is really powerful.

  • by sschueller on 11/22/16, 4:33 PM

    Why can't this just be MIT licensed?

  • by mareck16 on 11/22/16, 10:38 PM

    I've made the exact same thing, basically. A tool to convert AE animations to iOS. Has some other features, but it's also AE -> JSON -> code: http://www.squall.no Cool to see what the folks at FB came up with!

  • by kylehotchkiss on 11/22/16, 4:44 PM

    Neat! Where's the react-native port? I know there's gotta be one since FB uses it in their apps ;)

  • by yeldarb on 11/22/16, 4:57 PM

    Is there a way to also use it on the web? Presumably FB is also using it in their desktop site.

  • by omegote on 11/22/16, 5:12 PM

    Tell me again about how bad flash was for everything, please?

  • by amsheehan on 11/22/16, 4:20 PM

    I wonder what this means for animation studios, or edit houses. Obviously most dev shops don't have a need for full time animators, but just as obvious is that a lot of devs don't know animation fundamentals outside of how to implement an animation without jank.

  • by pointernil on 11/23/16, 10:40 AM

    Any "export-paths/pipelines" available to use the lib with After-Effects alternatives?

  • by omginternets on 11/22/16, 4:22 PM

    I'm reminded of this: https://youtu.be/pAEAbqrE5Zw

    Does it represent a lot of work by skilled technicians? Undoubtedly. Is it interesting in it's own right? Frankly I think not.

    The surrounding question of the socialization of the internet is interesting, to be sure, but at the end of the day these are just animated emojis...

  • by debt on 11/22/16, 8:27 PM

    is facebook okay? how many developer hours went into making their emojis animate properly? i don't want to say it's a waste of time/shareholder value but it might be.

    still interesting though. gonna check it out.

  • by nickmain on 11/22/16, 5:27 PM

    Related - YouI.tv is a commercial product that exports animations and assets from AfterEffects in order to build whole apps: http://www.youi.tv/youi-engine/

  • by puppetmaster3 on 11/23/16, 12:22 AM

    Or, be a winner and use GSAP.

    Just saying.

  • by omouse on 11/22/16, 4:42 PM

    Why not APNG?