using lottie for your ios apps
TRANSCRIPT
What is Lottie?✦ Lottie is an iOS, Android, and React Native library built by the
Airbnb engineering & design team.
✦ It converts After Effects animations to a format for use in your app.
✦ After Effects animations in your app…?! So tempting!
…This is a lightning talk!✦ The learning curve - Time, difficulty, shippable or not.
✦ My honest review - Good, bad, or weird experience through the exploring.
Time spent & Difficulty
DAY 1Started learning
After Effects
DAY 4Made something
okay
Day 5++Trying it with
Xcode!
🌶 🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶 🌶
Good = min-maxing!✦ From an idea to actual screen = less than 7 days
✦ FYI, This type of idea usually gets rejected by your PM. (Because it takes too much time!)
✦ A designer can work in parallel with a developer.
✦ You can boost up creativity!
✦ Super light. …The whole animation is only 9-15kb.
Bad…? Perhaps?
✦ It’s less smart when you want to swap an animation to something else. (We ended up using layer order)
✦ Honestly, there is nothing *seriously* bad.
Weird = Frame rates✦ Frame rates seem slightly off compared to After Effects.
✦ I don’t know what exactly causes this issue.
✦ Let me know if you know how to solve this!
Note: After the talk, many developers came to me and explain why. It wasn’t smooth because the CPU was rendering each single frame to show the animation. (That was how Lottie worked!) —> Hmm… I guess that’s something you need to trade off to get convenience for now!
Not now, but One day…✦ Complex layer effects
✦ Merged vector layers
✦ Gradient
✦ Buttons
✦ …Will be supported!
Conclusion✦ Recommend it, it’s really fun.
✦ Until it becomes more clever, the best place to use it is somewhere you don’t have to worry too much. (e.g: Replace static illustration with a looping animation?)
✦ Treat it as decoration.