Animotion – a visual CSS animation app | Hacker News Reader

Animotion – a visual CSS animation app

cssanimotion.pages.dev

375 pointsmarban35 comments

The fact that CSS3 was released in 1999 and such an app in 2023 is a cool HN-worthy post shows how easy, accessible/programmable/inspectable keyframe based animation got stuck with not much relief in sight. Flash dropped dead like a decade ago leaving a void, what remains is its husk as Adobe Animate, and droves of so-so frameworks and communities around them. Robust CSS/SVG based animation remained mostly an empty promise. You can find nice examples, sure, but it remains a niche craft.

I squarely blame Adobe for this stagnation, because I remember many people predicting that exactly this would happen when they bought Macromedia. Adobe just kills things, on purpose. Steve Jobs gets a side-order of blame.

So happy I don't give those shits money any more. Thanks Serif!

Browser support has come a long way in this time period as well.

Now we have the tech, and the demand, why aren't there more competitors?

Anybody in the web animation sector likely already has After Effects, which can be made web-ready with the Lottie plugin.

Worth mentioning that After Effects can export CSS/SVG/canvas animations with the free bodymovin/Lottie plugin. This is my personal go to for creating web key frame animations and elements.

Not every after effects feature is exportable, but it’s the best and most reliable solution I’ve found for this type of workflow, maybe due in part though to my previous experience with AE.

Currently supported features: http://airbnb.io/lottie/#/supported-features

I've ended up using GSAP in this vacuum for sequencing.

It's a weird heir for all things animation on the web these days, it works great but something about the keyframing/sequencing process seems like it should be supported natively.

Transitions and Transforms weren't available in 1999. Proper CSS animation with keyframes was first available in 2009 and even then browser support wasn't great -- lots of polyfills like 'moz-' and 'webkit-' were required.

jQueryUI was miles ahead in terms of delivering cross-browser compatible UI animation, so why bother with CSS3 animation which wouldn't work on IE8?

A modern jQuery UI could go such a long way.

I suppose Bootstrap fits this bill in a lot of ways but I feel like jQuery UI was even easier

Problem with jQuery UI was that it was bloated and came right at a time where bootstrap was taking off, IIRC. jQuery mobile didn't help much either.

The theming support was kind of nice though.

I feel like Flash was a technology that served to bridge the gap until faster cheaper internet and video streaming / hosting became mainstream.

These days, the demand is still there, but too niche, with people primarily using mobile device for content consumptions, and plenty of rich media content available in form of videos.

CSS as an animation spec is simply inferior so we failed to create an open community of people who cared enough about it - and people kept using other solutions

I have no problem with this. Animation on the web improves a page 5% of the time and makes it worse 95% of the time.

I don’t need to see any more Flash “Loading…” screens in my lifetime, especially just to see nav menus.

Even with instant broadband loading, the nav menu is better when it’s not animated. The post-masthead features section is better when it’s not animated.

The first thing I wanted to do was to move around keyframes. It seems like that's not yet a feature.

You can use Cut/Paste to change the keyframe position

nicely done. Glad to see the output is CSS, and not some javascript code tied up in a lib.

Are there any goodways of doing tool tips or hint what icons do on mobile? I do not understand what some icons do, I can test but as is said above no undo!

Undo/redo have been added

This looks great! I love how intuitive the editor is.

For those who need a bit more advanced timeline, check out Theatre.js. Nice to see more motion on the web platform!

What a great tool! Got me inspired to play with CSS animations for a bit. I would suggest adding some animation timing functions to the animation presets. Without them, they look a little stale.

Sources at: https://github.com/animotionjs/animotion

This is a different Animotion -- a Revealjs wrapper written in Svelte by "Joy of Code" from Youtube.

I guess from the URLs that the Svelte project predates this one:

https://cssanimotion.pages.dev/ https://animotion.pages.dev/

It's https://animotion.dev or https://www.animotion.dev now

This is really intuitive, even on mobile surprisingly

Agreed.

I was able to instantly edit an animation and add a “squishy” feel - by stretching the element at the keyframes, according to its motion; very satisfying.

One thing I couldn’t find is undo/redo. Is it there on mobile (or desktop for that matter)?

+100 for undo/redo.

Undo/redo have been added

Thanks for adding this, I find it very useful.

More feedback: I'd like for undo/redo to move me to the keyframe with the change; similar to how a cursor jumps in a text editor during undo/redo. It's a detail though and perhaps you have other features to work on.

That's a great suggestion, thank you. I'll definitely work on implementing it

Wow amazing work, very cool tool. Thanks for sharing!

This is cool! I've also found GPT-4 is really good at generating complex CSS animations

That is so good, works excellently even on mobile. I shall bookmark!

This is an amazing tool. Incredibly useful. Thank you.

This is awesome

good stuff. pretty intuitive UI

Love it!

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