Famo.us Demos | Hacker News Reader

Famo.us Demos

demo.famo.us

86 pointsepaga67 comments

This whole thing has been handled quite strangely. Let's compare with angularjs or threejs.

These frameworks have been developped openly from the very beginning and grew based on user's needs.

Here we have a project,that has received 2 million in funding,which is great,yet it's completely opaque,with a closed beta (I signed for it,never got anything but junk mail,no code to test whatsoever).

IMHO it qualifies as vaporware, an tech demo that looks great but with little practical use.

All these demos perform remarkably bad for 2 million.

Indeed, not even on high-end smartphone does this produce over 10fps (Tested on iPhone 5, Nexus 4, Samsung galaxy s4)

Can't tell if you are trolling. On my 5s it seems pretty smooth.

Also, none of them require WebGL. They could have been (better done!) with plain HTML + CSS, or SVG.

The tech demo looked great 2 years ago. Doesn't even have that anymore.

Hey there. Employee at Famo.us here. This URL wasn't meant for public distribution, but that's beside the point. We're officially launching on the 9th, and I can only hope we change your opinion of "Famo.us as vaporware" then and onwards.

Ultimately, the proof is in the product. I'm just excited to share with you what we think is some pretty sweet technology. If we convince (or don't convince) you, let me know. david@famo.us

Link poster here - oops, sorry about that, I didn't know it wasn't meant for public distribution. I don't even remember where I found it, I think I saw it linked in a slide of a hackathon presentation somewhere - I loved the demos.

I think your new sandbox warning at the top is perfect and helps correct some of the expectations.

Entirely our fault. But if you still feel guilty, the best thing you can do is try recreating lineTime in famo.us. I think you'll find it a pleasure :-)

2 years ago, it was cool.

Today #GSAP is the state of art, if you want futuristic UX, spend a few minutes exploring this site UX: http://intothearctic.gp (get past 'start exploring')

Today it is a solution looking for a problem and no market.

The animation on the site you linked to is very janky and that's part of the problem with building mobile apps using web tech, it's really hard to get a solid 60 fps. If these guys cracked the problem then there is definitely a huge market for it.

Some of their demos run really bad on my machine. If they cracked the problem, they aren't showing it yet.

Some seriously slick stuff there! #inspired

Exactly. I felt the same way when I watched their most recent videos. I kept thinking that there were things like GSAP which were already available that produce kick ass fluid animations for HTML. IIRC, their founder also said things like their framework wasn't easy to work with, but if you learn it and stick with it you can do great things. That's true of Javascript/WebGL, etc, already, so why bother with their framework at all?

Shrug. Yeah, some of this stuff looks great, but it's not doing anything that wasn't possible before. The really important part is how it's structured, what the code looks like, how you go about actually implementing any of these features.

And famo.us appears to be in some kind of silly closed beta, so I'm not sure what I can even evaluate here.

The public beta starts on April 9th (they sent an announcement yesterday).

I'll believe it when I see it. Signed up for the beta list a whole year ago and never heard back, other than very lengthy "developer updates" that had no relevance to me. I've been bitbucketing the mails ever since.

I was a huge fan of famo.us until just now. Testing in iPhone4S, most of these apps are super jittery (never continuously 60fps) and unresponsive to touch in the browser, especially Yahoo Weather, which looks to be the only one complex enough to resemble a full app.

At best, this is a very impressive "mobile web app" framework NOT a native replacement. I would never trade up obj-c for cordoba/js if this is the kind of inconsistent performance users will have to deal with... and btw I love javascript.

I think steve is a phenomenal entrepreneur but may have built this launch up way too much. Without their native wrapper and MVC this feels like it's going to be a few years before it can rival native development.

weather is just a blank black screen on my Mac...doesn't even seem worth pulling out a mobile to try

None of these demos are for desktop, famo.us was built mobile first

Sorry but Steve is hardly phenomenal. All his talks are just hype and have little content. Have you attended his talks face to face? So much talk and so little actual stuff.

EDIT: compare him to the other Steve. Jobs only ever announces stuff that is pretty much ready for shipping. Now that's phenomenal.

How viable are "clever" ccTLDs outside .com and .org? I've always wondered how usable those domains are to people outside our small tech bubble.

Especially back when the .ly domains were all the rage, but also now that .io have the same SEO as .com domains.

I've always wanted to use one, but the fact that very few domain hack startups have taken off keeps me away.

last.fm and del.icio.us are the best examples I can come up with of successful startups with domain hacks, and I don't think del.icio.us was ever a huge hit outside of the tech world. Plus they both ended up buying/switching to the dot coms anyway.

I clever as this URL looks, I hate typing it. For some reason I always spell it wrong, like famou.us

Yeah, there's a mental tax to domains like that beyond merely understanding what they read.

Not too viable I'd say. The fun already starts when you need to explain the url.

"Yeah it's Famous. Not normally spelled, but with dot us at the end."

I believe a name should be obvious beyond explanation. If you can't afford the straight dotcom better use an slightly longer url that features the name (like getbootstrap.com).

To be honest, their demo's seem confusing and don't feel "right" in an ux way.

Famo.us is a sad company that doesn't know how to die. All their sessions and talk are just hype. I am guessing they built some fancy DSL at the end of the day.

It is simply not possible to revolutionize HTML without changing/updating the runtime. Sadly for us, the runtime WebView shipped as part of Android is super underperformant. The one shipped with iOS is stripped of features and JIT.

This looked fun back when I first started learning web development...

...then I started building real apps.

I can't imagine the practical application for this framework? By the time you've built something, optimized it, and likely pulled your hair out getting it to play right with all the forgotten things in web app demos (Ajax, data persistence, security, etc), you probably could have done it native. Additionally, at least by doing it native you'd know that browsers aren't going to come along, update, and wipe out the framework.

Does anyone pay attention to user activity, experience stats? Trying yo habitualize your users into using a web app, ESPECIALLY MOBILE, is a losing battle. If social network giants can't get users on mobile web apps.............therefore picking this framework isn't just building with new tools. It's also trying to onboard users into something they typically avoid.

With http://Clara.io, we couldn't have done it natively and have it run on Linux, Windows and OSX without a huge investments. Our target is not mobile though.

I don't understand the mentality of some devs around who just complain and bitch.

Sorry to be blunt but I am fed up looking for updates of companies which ate least try to change something and then see a long string of lazy-azz comments from 'developers' who learn/know jquery and friends and world begins and ends with this.

Apologies to those who don't bitch but try to see the big picture here.

Oh, and I am not presenting famo.us and native Android is my bread and butter.

But it does not lock me up in my small world of know-all and all-else-is-sh.

@ famo.us team Thank you guys, at least you are trying to change and expand boundaries, companies like your and CodenameOne are the real attempt of small shops to oppose these Google, Apple and Microsoft suckers who don't want to change and will never change if it depends on them.

Keep trying, there are many developers who will back you up!

Not sure why all the complaints. Sure, on an iPhone 4 like some people seem to be using these are going to be slow; just running iOS7 is sluggish on that phone, but on my 5s the yahoo weather app was very impressive, indistinguishable from the highly rated native app.

I'm on iPhone 5 and they run "okay." If a 3 year old, 2 million dollar framework is already ruling out everything but the absolute newest devices, what do they expect devs to use it for? Pet projects pretty much seem like the only thing.

I can't imagine using this on something professional that targets a realistic target population.

> If a 3 year old, 2 million dollar framework is already ruling out everything but the absolute newest devices, what do they expect devs to use it for?

While I am not a defender of famo.us, the jury is still out, I think that investing in a framework for the future, especially when the future comes so quickly in the mobile space is fine. No one supports four year old devices, not Android nor iOS, so no framework support is okay too. Frameworks need to have their head in the future, especially if they require significant investment to create.

Is this really that BIG? They started this project back in 2011 if I remember correctly, and it never really took off. There are way better webgl alternatives performance wise.

And yeah they haven't released a SDK yet as some people have mentioned here.

Rise is the most beautiful thing I've seen.

Here's the iPhone app. https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/rise-alarm-clock/id577221529...

Reminds me very much of Timely for Android. Except much less intuitive and much more confusing.

Lightbox looks pretty great, but the non-native scrolling is a no-go. Especially on mobile devices you expect the native inertia formula to be used and not some contrived approximation.

That's one of the main concerns I have with it. They're really hanging their hat on the fact that they implemented a physics engine so they don't have to rely on OS-native things like inertia, so it works the same everywhere. Problem is, even if it's consistent in famo.us, nobody likes random things to feel "off" in the manner you bring up. Seems like a lot of effort to do something that most people won't like anyway.

Lightbox is really the saddest app. It has no features a web page from 1995 couldn't do - except for the animation, which is about jQuery 2006 level, and can be done with native CSS easily nowadays.

I saw the link in the meteor tech talk but figured it was not for public distribution. However now that it is in the wild, for the curious I have been de-minifying the paper example to try and learn how to use famo.us.

https://github.com/jperl/paper

Also I am not sure why there are all these haters. In the few days I have been using it, I can see it is going to change mobile web app development entirely. Really excited for the launch!

I thought famo.us was about using the DOM and CSS matrix3d but these examples are just using a canvas element like you would expect. What is famo.us exactly?

I had the source open the whole time and only saw CSS 3d transforms. I'm on chrome 33

Finally something that makes the fan go on my macbook 2GHz i7 Intel Iris Pro 1024 MB. I was starting to think this thing didn't even have a fan.

I really want to like Famo.us. There's some really nice effects being demonstrated, the fallbacks to older browser technologies are useful, and it seems to make it really easy to develop new things. But... it's not really anything that a combination of d3.js, three.js, rapheal.js, webaudiox, dancer.js, etc can't do for free and without all the "secrecy" nonsense.

I think their idea tends to be to try and unify everything and provide a "toolbelt" for developing with it. At least that is the impression I get when I read their FAQ: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aC461kM855a66SzFT_TG8sHp...

Given the hype (from them), I was very underwhelmed with the demos. I then remembered that this stuff is supposed to run well on phones (not the WebGL stuff, obviously, at least for iPhones). So I ran it on my phone and several of the demos stuttered / jerked a lot if you tried to use it while loading. Though once they fully loaded, they ran really well (smoothly).

This is pretty, and a nice framework - but it needs a LOT of optimization before it could be considered anywhere near usable.

People keep mentioning funding etc. Anyone have a link to a quick backstory for these guys?

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/famo-us

Thanks.

http://famo.us Has a nice YouTube clip of someone's personal site that looks quite impressive.... why is that not one of the demos? Is the video a fake?

if you research the history of famo.us that was the app they were originally funded to build, and took a ton of hacks and workarounds to achieve good HTML5 perf. Thats when they realised the opportunity for a famo.us-like framework was necessary.

So is that app (in the YouTube video) using famo.us or not?

Where is the Youtube video? I don't find it.

http://famo.us

There are two embedded youtube videos, the one on the left.

Oh, this is weird. It serves a different page for Firefox (no WebGL? No WebKit?). There's a full page live demo of the periodic table (the another video) on Chrome and Safari.

2 seconds per frame on iPad.

Yup, famo.us is like a 'rendering engine' for the web, not a traditional JS app framework. I expect seeing architecture similar to game engines, such as Unity.

http://demo.famo.us/tweetus/ doesn't work on my Android native browser

I'd like to point out that famo.us recently announced a public beta release date of April 9th, with respect to the "secrecy" criticism.

0/10 - learn to loading screen, wtf is this 1994

Is it just me, or is mouse wheel the ONLY way to scroll in those lists? Not even "page down" works.

Buttons are nicked from Windows Phone yet this is totally broken in WP IE10.

"CodePen Evaluation License" in each app.js ?

All of the demos on this page have been available on codepen for months: http://codepen.io/befamous/

There's nothing new here.

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