[HN Gopher] Show HN: Moos.app - Interactive animated experiences...
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Show HN: Moos.app - Interactive animated experiences for the web
Author : thomasikzelf
Score : 77 points
Date : 2021-12-07 15:20 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (moos.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (moos.app)
| thomasikzelf wrote:
| Hello Hacker News, founder here. I'm very excited about this
| startup.
|
| One feature of this tool that I am particularly excited about
| which I think people here will appreciate is the way expressions
| are implemented. Expressions are fully typed and the types are
| automatically inferred. When you leave a hole the editor will
| tell you what type fits there.
|
| Don't forget to try out the (full) app in the playground!
| rememberlenny wrote:
| The playground examples are very neat. Great job!
| canadianwriter wrote:
| That's a... unique pricing. Or maybe I'm just really behind in
| the times - hours of using the app? And then only a per project
| without an unlimited plan?
|
| It seems cool, just have never encountered pricing like that and
| it would certainly take me aback and reconsider using the tool.
| Especially when I don't fully know what a "project" is.
| thomasikzelf wrote:
| you're right it's.... special. Let me give you my thought
| process: - One time pricing can be a real
| hurdle for users to pay upfront. Remember adobe costing a lot
| of money up front. The upside is that after this initial huge
| hurdle your free to use the product. For the business non
| recurring revenue means they need to batch changes to make
| buying the product worth while. This results in a long cycle
| between updates. - Subscription pricing aligns the
| business with it's users. Users pay only for what they use and
| the business can ship features to the user as fast as possible.
| - The downside is the subscription is often 'per user' and is
| done on an ongoing basis. You pay for the tool even if you
| don't use it. - Usage based pricing: you only pay
| for what you use in the smallest quantity that is
| understandable. This is what I use and what AWS uses for
| example. I think this is a really fair pricing model. If you're
| only doing one project it might cost you 3 bucks, but if you
| are a company that uses the tool fulltime you pay accordingly.
|
| It might turn out that too many people are turned off by this
| pricing, I don't know. It is easier to change to a regular
| pricing model then to a weird one :-).
|
| If you open one of the examples that is one project. Your
| project can be published at one unique URL.
| sombremesa wrote:
| Does this really align the business with its users? With this
| model aren't you incentivized to make users waste as much
| time as possible so their time spent in the app increases,
| which is directly convertible to $ for you?
|
| I'm not convinced. Maybe I've misunderstood something.
|
| Charging for time spent developing is very different from
| what AWS does.
| thomasikzelf wrote:
| Yeah you are right, there is no perfect alignment. I also
| agree that the usage based pricing from AWS is different
| from my hourly pricing (hourly being a subset of usage
| based).
|
| I've never seen hourly based pricing being used for tools
| before. But hourly based pricing is common for human
| services and also for things such as AWS Lambda or VPS's.
| You could make an argument for AWS having an incentive for
| slow running lambda's.
|
| In these cases you can test if the speed of AWS lambda is
| good enough for you. Similarly you can try out my app (for
| free) to see if it's slow or fast, and you can see this
| directly instead of having to rely on AWS's logs.
|
| Anyway thank you for your feedback. It's really valuable
| for me to read these responses!
| sabellito wrote:
| Some feedback: on the landing page on desktop, I spent 4-5
| seconds trying to interact with the image, then I tried clicking
| on the underlined "interactive" word.
| _1tan wrote:
| Cool! Is it open-source?
|
| Reminds me of Flash.
| thomasikzelf wrote:
| Flash also took interactivity to the next level back in it's
| day. There is still adobe animate (which is the flash editor)
| but it does not adapt to screen sizes and you quickly need to
| drop down into code. I'm hoping to build a tool that can match
| flash in creativity with less of a learning curve, so that non
| programmers can use it too.
|
| Building all of this is a lot of work (and this is only the
| beginning). I think open-source is not a viable way of building
| this right now. Development will stall before a critical mass
| of features allows wider adoption.
| sporklpony wrote:
| Maybe take a look at Wick Editor?
| https://www.wickeditor.com/#/ It's open source and
| development has stalled lately, but it has a stated goal of
| being a low-learning-curve flash replacement.
| thomasikzelf wrote:
| This is actually a great example. Wick editor is an awesome
| tool but it needs a lot of work to become the go-to tool
| for creators. You can see that the Patreon now pulls in 147
| euro p/m, not enough to sustain someone working on it.
|
| It's a (awesome) niche tool and to become mainstream (for
| designers) it needs more features, but there needs to be
| money to built those. A catch 22.
| ArekDymalski wrote:
| >I'm hoping to build a tool that can match flash in
| creativity with less of a learning curve, so that non
| programmers can use it too.
|
| Are you familiar with Corel Rave? That was perfect Flash
| editor imho. I still miss it.
| thomasikzelf wrote:
| I never used it. It looks like people mainly used it for
| animations, I am not sure what kind of interactivity it
| allowed. It seems that the program didn't support
| actionscript.
|
| If somebody wants to do animation and then export it to a
| video then tools like adobe animate and adobe after effects
| are still better options, although cavalry[0] looks really
| cool as well.
|
| These do not really have the interactivity that moos.app
| gives you though.
|
| [0]: https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/
| rapnie wrote:
| Note that your examples on the site are empty boxes on FF
| Android. Otherwise some nice animations my quick peek showed me.
| XzAeRosho wrote:
| I just checked on FF Android, and the examples worked fine.
| Maybe it's related to the Android version you're running? I'm
| currently on Android 11.
| rapnie wrote:
| Ah yes, this is Android 8.
| thomasikzelf wrote:
| Thanks for the heads up. I test on browser stack and it seems
| to be working there. The videos are AVIF or MP4 and there are
| definitively problems with AVIF implementations. For example in
| Edge AVIF would not play but it would also not fallback to MP4.
|
| If more people have problems I will have to fallback to just
| MP4. It is a shame though, the AVIF files are a lot smaller.
| mindvirus wrote:
| Super cool, but I think your landing page could use some work:
|
| 1. First thing is an interactive-looking image, with a play
| button etc. I'd recommend embedding a real widget built with your
| tool there.
|
| 2. The FUTURE/TODAY sections are really spaced apart and have no
| images.
|
| 3. In the Skada section, "powerfull" is spelled incorrectly
| (should have one L).
|
| I know that sharing stuff online is stressful - so really want to
| emphasize that it looks like you're doing great work here, and
| congratulations on shipping :)
| pedalpete wrote:
| Completely agree. I'll also add the "do you stand out?" didn't
| really speak to me. It doesn't really give me an idea of what
| you're doing, what does "stand out" mean? Stand out from whom?
| Why?
|
| As a contrast, our tagline - which my co-founder hates, and
| also isn't great - says "want better sleep?". It's clear what
| we're bringing to the table, what area we're working in.
| all2 wrote:
| Came here to say #1. If I see a play button, I expect to be
| able to push said button. I went to grab the scrubber with my
| mouse and I got nothing. I was quite disappointed.
|
| Definitely use a video showing features above the fold. A
| picture doesn't communicate very much to me, especially for
| something for animation/motion.
| thomasikzelf wrote:
| Thank you both for the feedback, I appreciate it. If you want
| to see what is shown in the screenshot you can go to
| https://playground.moos.app/#!example-skada
| [deleted]
| cr3ative wrote:
| Just FYI, this fails to load with the Dark Reader extension
| installed - you're relying on the DOM position of a
| stylesheet, which extensions can change. Might want to look
| in to that. https://i.imgur.com/yqjqrWI_d.webp?maxwidth=152
| 0&fidelity=gr...
| webwielder2 wrote:
| How does this compare to Tumult Hype? https://tumult.com/hype/
| thomasikzelf wrote:
| I never used tumult but I think these are the differences:
| - Moos.app has built-in "behaviors" that are sort of a template
| for interactions. For example the scroller behavior allows you
| to put text next to your visuals, when the user then scrolls
| your visuals will update. It also works on mobile and desktop
| without additional actions. - I found that using SVG or
| HTML for complex animations is way to slow. That's why moos.app
| uses a custom WEBGL renderer. - Moos.app works in the
| browser, Tumult is a mac app - As Tumult is older it has
| a bigger community - Tumult has no web hosting build in
| (I think). With moos.app you click a button and you get a link
| (or a self contained HTML file) - Tumult is a one time
| payment while moos.app is usage-based-pay
| rchaud wrote:
| I think the ability to create and animate objects in a 3D
| space would really set this app apart. I say this as a
| frequent user of Hype.
|
| The examples on the website are nice, however from what I
| saw, they can be done in Hype as well. As you mentioned, Hype
| is more mature and has a sizable community, many of whom
| contribute towards extending its functionality by creating
| custom modules in JS for things like dynamic data imported w/
| JSON.
|
| For 3D animation I've also used Spline, which is in beta.
| It's interesting, but on my 2014 MBP, it runs slowly and the
| fans are constantly on, which makes it less appealing for my
| use.
| gamlegaz wrote:
| > - I found that using SVG or HTML for complex animations is
| way to slow. That's why moos.app uses a custom WEBGL
| renderer.
|
| Did you try Canvas2D? Also curious to what you used for the
| 2D rendering, did you do your own implementation?
| thomasikzelf wrote:
| Yes a previous version was built on canvas2D. For simple
| things such as a couple of objects moving across the screen
| it works great. As soon as you start to do fullscreen
| "camera" movements performance starts to suffer. All images
| and paths need to be uploaded to the gpu every frame. Maybe
| the browser optimizes some things but in my tests it was
| not enough.
|
| The WEBGL renderer in this project is built from scratch
| because none were available that support SVG and were small
| enough for regular web pages. It allows me to upload paths
| and images to the gpu making fullscreen animations a lot
| more smooth.
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(page generated 2021-12-07 23:01 UTC)