[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)
 
web link (moos.app)
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)