Show HN: Fanfa – Interactive and animated Mermaid diagrams

The animations don't seem to be retained across nodes, which seems to make the animations pretty noise more than a means to convey useful information.

For example in this simplified chart:

    flowchart LR
        subgraph Inputs
            A
            B
        end

        subgraph Middleware
            M 
        end

        subgraph Outputs
            X
            Y
        end

        A --> M
        B --> M
        M --> X
        M --> Y
        G --> L
    end

```

The input animation colors are pink and green, but the next step (M->output) is blue and orange.

I'd expect to see actual flow of usage/data (and if it included diagram syntax to specify message rates, etc that would be even better). So if there's a blue dot on the input side, I should be able to track that on the output side to its final destination.

Huh... I'm not being to login with github :/ it says 404:

https://github.com/login/oauth/authorize?access_type=offline...

Congrats on launching.

It might be worth considering a feature to time/schedule each flow's animation, rather than having them run in an infinite loop, all at the same time.

UX feedback:

* The animation and the whole interface are sluggish on firefox/linux. There's about 1 sec delay after each action (like clicking on an option). * The site's CSS does not load on an old version of Chrome - v90 - (and the chart and animation don't either).

I love it. I saw a comment in this thread saying that adding animation to a chart is pointless.

However in some public speeches, I've always wanted to add some cool charts to attract attention. Especially at large events, a slightly different presentation can make my stuff stand out and gain more attention.

Your work has a nice launch here in HackerNews but no upvotes on ProductHunt, so I just voted there to support you

Awesome idea! I'm trying to use it for a YouTube video.

This graph here has display issues. And the CPU is used waay too much on firefox

``` flowchart TD Step1["*Step 1: POC* (4 weeks)<br/>Vibe code for ONE tenant"]

    Step1 --> Validate & Hire

    Validate["Validation (4 weeks)"]
    Hire["Hire developer (4 weeks)"]

    Validate & Hire --> Spec

    subgraph Spec["**Step 3: Specification** (with dev)"]
        SpecStart["Parallel"] --> UI["UI prototype"]
        SpecStart --> POC["POCs of all parts"]
        SpecStart --> Arch["Architecture + stack"]
        SpecStart --> Infra["Infrastructure"]
        SpecStart --> FullSpec["Full MVP spec"]
        UI & POC & Arch & Infra & FullSpec --> SpecEnd["Done"]
    end

```

It looks nice at first sight, but which data moves to which point exactly? Every element has blobs with all colours of the rainbow just moving across a line.

Wouldn't it be better if a Red square emits a Red ball that moves to some place? Or at least highlight 'paths' to show how stuff actually moves around?

Looking quite promising! I would love to use this as a code friendly animated diagraming tool. Some feature requests that would make it stand out for me:

1. Have you thought about creating some react components that would render these? You could then embed them in webpages and docs using something like https://fumadocs.dev/

2. For the animations themselves, you could have more customization options. For instance, adding the support for text cards or different shapes. I think having the option to add text in the moving parts would be really helpful for this kind of use case.

Nice! I always looked for a solution to animate diagrams as it would help a lot in visualising the workflow.

Feedback:

1. I tried different mermaid diagrams from https://mermaid.live/, and your animation is only working with classes and flowcharts. It didn't work with the sequence diagram (which is the most interesting to me).

2. It would be great to control the animation to be a sequence instead of one animation for all arrows at once. What I would like to do is show fellow devs the workflow from start to finish, according to the spec.

I appreciate that this is just a start, but it looks promising and has great potential. Good luck!

I don't understand how to use this, but it does touch on an interesting topic. I want to create interactive and animated diagrams. I normally use either Draw.io or plantuml. My goal is to better teach folks about the systems I'm building, through better visualizations. Something like IcePanel (which is way too expensive) sort of shows flows, but I'd like to have full control. Does this tool claim to support something like that? If not, are there options out there that I don't know about?

Is there a way to control the mechanics of the animation? I poked around a bit and didn't see a way to configure what was sent down the arrows or how often - just some theming options.

For example, if you're visualizing a user flow, you might want rules about when new "objects" are sent down the pipe (example node rule: wait until received one item from each input), or how fast they travel, etc.

This looks great.

For the demo on the screen, it would be great to reveal each subgraph as a step before it all flows together.

Is there any thought / plan / feasibility for adding a "reveal" type verb that could be placed between each subgraph to wait for a keypress to reveal the next subgraph? In the meantime, one could create 3 diagrams I guess of with one more subgraph added.

Looks cool!

Here's some feedback:

- the diagram is not centered and zoomed by default, this is easy to fix

- it would be great to have better animation controls, like progressbar, play half speed, etc.

- it would be great to be able to export animation to video, animgif, etc. e. g. with ffmpeg.js

I would love an option to export as a gif that loops perfectly.

Go has a package to parse its own source. Use it to map a Go executable to Fanfa and then take a front row seat to watch your code execute.

I don't see anything animated except a bit on load? I don't get it. This is on iOS Safari.

- how much is Pro and what does it do?

- can I download as animated gif or mpeg4 to embed into slides?

Looks good, can i animate just connection to clicked node?

Can’t tell from that link. Is there a better layout engine?

I don't understand who in the world needs animated something on his diagrams.

wow, this is cool, to be frank im working on something similar so we might end up being competition xD but i dont want to hijack thread, nice work and congrats on release, upvoted you on producthunt!

love it!