HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

jawishhameed

31 karma · joined October 15, 2019

submissionscomments
jawishhameed··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2024)
LottieFiles | https://lottiefiles.com | Full-time | Remote

We are looking for 1) a highly skilled Graphics Engineer with a strong foundation in web-based graphics technologies such as Three.js, WebGL, and Canvas API, and 2) Senior Front-end Engineers skilled at building high performance web applications. Come work with us on the LottieFiles Creator, the web-based animation tool aimed at taking full advantage of the features of Lottie animation format.

We also have a few Senior Fullstack Engineer roles open!

Apply here: https://lottiefiles.com/careers/#open-positions

jawishhameed··on Show HN: DotLottie Player – A New Universal Lottie Player Built with Rust
Sorry, 16 Kb would be a dream for us but we aren't there! The Javascript for the play API and bindings for WASM is around 18 Kb now - but the WASM bundle that is then loaded is currently 308 Kb. :(
jawishhameed··on Show HN: DotLottie Player – A New Universal Lottie Player Built with Rust
> 1. What is the total weight of loaded resources?

Current release clocks in at 326 Kb over the network, with brotli. We have been focussed on getting the functionality and have yet to start working on reducing the total size. There are optimizations we can do with ThorVG and emscripten and eliminating some of the dependencies we currently use. Aiming for < 200 Kb.

> 2. If I would like to add some animations to my website.

We believe so! With the Lottie animations converted to dotlottie (using our website or the opensource tooling), there is significant further file reduction to Lottie animations, especially if you choose to bundle multiple animations into a single dotlottie distribution. Depending on the number of animations you have, the currently somewhat large player size is offset by the further reduction and bundling. It becomes an even better proposition if you are using theming to change colors or values in the animation for different themes the website may have. The vector nature of the format also makes it ideal if dynamic resizing for media size adjustments are a requirement!

> 3. How good is the support among the different browsers on the desktop and mobiles?

With the current release, we are targetting for full compatibility and consistency in the modern evergreen browsers. We haven't yet tested the compatibilty with older browsers though. The support on mobile is great on both Android and iOS, as well as for desktop apps.

jawishhameed··on Show HN: DotLottie Player – A New Universal Lottie Player Built with Rust
We are loving it! Team picked up Rust and got started building productively in a few weeks.
jawishhameed··on Show HN: DotLottie Player – A New Universal Lottie Player Built with Rust
> What advantages does this have over the players from Airbnb? Those are still great alternatives! In the existing Airbnb suite of players, the implementations for web, iOS and Android are completely different and have different sets of Lottie feature support and have visual inconsistencies in the output.

This fragmentation creates a less than ideal workflow for both motion designers and developers where animations need to be tested on the different players to verify before shipping. With dotlottie-rs suite of players, we are hoping to solve this problem. You can also generally expect better performance, especially with Lotties with large number of elements and the complex layer effects possible in Lottie.

> Will it work with existing Lottie animations? The current release supports >95% of the animations on our community contributed free animations library. No changes required! We open-sourced a tool called relottie ((https://github.com/LottieFiles/relottie) to detect unsupported features in a Lottie for this player (and other players) to help folks build a validation step in their CI/CD.

We are making frequent contributions and releases on ThorVG and dotlottie-rs to get to 100% support!

jawishhameed··on Lottie – Use after effects animations in web and native apps
For the vast majority of use cases, you could try using the jlottie player (15kb gzipped) instead of lottie-web. jlottie was built to support a limited set of Lottie features, based on the data we have, to support 80+% of the Lottie animations we typically see.

https://github.com/LottieFiles/jlottie

jawishhameed··on Lottie – Use after effects animations in web and native apps
That's a real pro-tip! Lottie animation JSONs are better left out of the bundling and loaded dynamically.

We built dotLottie[1], a little superset encapsulation layer ontop of Lottie as an experiment/solution to make it easer to bundle multiple Lotties and any associated assets AND make distribution/CDN use simpler. There are several sites that are using it now with good success.

1. https://dotlottie.io/

jawishhameed··on Lottie – Use after effects animations in web and native apps
We have a plugin for Adobe Animate (formerly Adobe Flash Professional) that exports to Lottie, similar to the plugin for After Effects. It's pretty rough at the moment though with many Animate features not supported.

https://lottiefiles.com/plugins/animate

PS: I work for LottieFiles and built the plugin.

jawishhameed··on Lottie – Use after effects animations in web and native apps
We released a Lottie exporter plugin for Adobe Animate (currently available as an alpha release) so that all the skill and experience people had gained with Flash/Animate can be used to create Lottie animations!

https://lottiefiles.com/plugins/animate

Disclosure: I work at LottieFiles.