8 ms·
Show HN: Fanfa – Interactive and animated Mermaid diagrams
- 2muchcoffeeman 10mo agoCan’t tell from that link. Is there a better layout engine?
- fwip 10mo agoIs there a way to control the mechanics of the animation? I poked around a bit and didn't see a way to configure what was sent down the arrows or how often - just some theming options. For example, if you're visualizing a user flow, you might want rules about when new "objects" are sent down the pipe (example node rule: wait until received one item from each input), or how fast they travel, etc.
- bairess 10mo agoThere will more a powerful controls for each node soon. For now there is a "Director mode" to control speed and traffic.
- yakbarber 10mo agolove it!
- mal10c 10mo agoI don't understand how to use this, but it does touch on an interesting topic. I want to create interactive and animated diagrams. I normally use either Draw.io or plantuml. My goal is to better teach folks about the systems I'm building, through better visualizations. Something like IcePanel (which is way too expensive) sort of shows flows, but I'd like to have full control. Does this tool claim to support something like that? If not, are there options out there that I don't know about?
- difosfor 10mo agoI don't see anything animated except a bit on load? I don't get it. This is on iOS Safari.
- bairess 10mo agoWill take a look let me know the details please
- larodi 10mo agoI don't understand who in the world needs animated something on his diagrams.
- nantangitan 10mo agoThere's been times in the past when I've had nontechnical stakeholders present for otherwise technical meetings. A little bit of colour and a little bit of animation can go a long way to helping people who may be less familiar with this type of diagram to understand it better. All the better if I can take an existing diagram and just spruce it up slightly for presentation.
- larodi 10mo agoI’ve done my fair share of diagramming and one thing I know for sure is markup (In he visual one) needs to be as clear as possible. As someone who started with demo scene and all I can understand the drive to have moving parts and all the gay stuff, but many people get easily confused by colours and animation.
- Oras 10mo agoNice! I always looked for a solution to animate diagrams as it would help a lot in visualising the workflow. Feedback: 1. I tried different mermaid diagrams from https://mermaid.live/ https://mermaid.live/, and your animation is only working with classes and flowcharts. It didn't work with the sequence diagram (which is the most interesting to me). 2. It would be great to control the animation to be a sequence instead of one animation for all arrows at once. What I would like to do is show fellow devs the workflow from start to finish, according to the spec. I appreciate that this is just a start, but it looks promising and has great potential. Good luck!
- bairess 10mo agoThanks for the valuable feedback. I already cover most of the issues that you described. Should be good to go in the next release
- tillcarlos 10mo agoAwesome idea! I'm trying to use it for a YouTube video. This graph here has display issues. And the CPU is used waay too much on firefox ``` flowchart TD Step1["*Step 1: POC* (4 weeks)<br/>Vibe code for ONE tenant"] Step1 --> Validate & Hire Validate["Validation (4 weeks)"] Hire["Hire developer (4 weeks)"] Validate & Hire --> Spec subgraph Spec["**Step 3: Specification** (with dev)"] SpecStart["Parallel"] --> UI["UI prototype"] SpecStart --> POC["POCs of all parts"] SpecStart --> Arch["Architecture + stack"] SpecStart --> Infra["Infrastructure"] SpecStart --> FullSpec["Full MVP spec"] UI & POC & Arch & Infra & FullSpec --> SpecEnd["Done"] end ```
- bairess 10mo agoFeel you, Im running FF/macos as well and svg aniamtions over CPU/GPU could be a problem. Im planning to address this issue soon
- frankhsu 10mo agoI love it. I saw a comment in this thread saying that adding animation to a chart is pointless. However in some public speeches, I've always wanted to add some cool charts to attract attention. Especially at large events, a slightly different presentation can make my stuff stand out and gain more attention. Your work has a nice launch here in HackerNews but no upvotes on ProductHunt, so I just voted there to support you
- tillcarlos 10mo agoYeah, 100%. Just having something to move around catches the eye. Cheap trick but works - that's why most short videos have subtitles. I love this idea. Problem is: it competes with "Hey Claude, take this diagram and animate it". The results are different (worse / better in different regards), but you can modify it more to your liking. Maybe I'm not seeing the exact use case. I was very close to buying the plan (3 usd / m is a steal), but with Claude I can be more specific what I want.
- bairess 10mo agoYes. I could just render the .mmd plain as vanilla and will works just fine for devs but It may not get the attention of non technical folks
- j45 10mo agoMotion definitely can help charts work better. Especially when the charts get really complex or detailed.
- knuit 10mo agoI would love an option to export as a gif that loops perfectly.
- jankovicsandras 10mo agoLooks cool! Here's some feedback: - the diagram is not centered and zoomed by default, this is easy to fix - it would be great to have better animation controls, like progressbar, play half speed, etc. - it would be great to be able to export animation to video, animgif, etc. e. g. with ffmpeg.js
- matsz 10mo agoYou might not even need ffmpeg.js for that anymore. WebCodecs API is well supported nowadays. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/VideoEncoder https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/VideoEncode...
- max002 10mo agowow, this is cool, to be frank im working on something similar so we might end up being competition xD but i dont want to hijack thread, nice work and congrats on release, upvoted you on producthunt!
- me_bx 10mo agoCongrats on launching. It might be worth considering a feature to time/schedule each flow's animation, rather than having them run in an infinite loop, all at the same time. UX feedback: * The animation and the whole interface are sluggish on firefox/linux. There's about 1 sec delay after each action (like clicking on an option). * The site's CSS does not load on an old version of Chrome - v90 - (and the chart and animation don't either).
- marapuru 10mo agoIt looks nice at first sight, but which data moves to which point exactly? Every element has blobs with all colours of the rainbow just moving across a line. Wouldn't it be better if a Red square emits a Red ball that moves to some place? Or at least highlight 'paths' to show how stuff actually moves around?
- victor_y 10mo agoLooking quite promising! I would love to use this as a code friendly animated diagraming tool. Some feature requests that would make it stand out for me: 1. Have you thought about creating some react components that would render these? You could then embed them in webpages and docs using something like https://fumadocs.dev/ https://fumadocs.dev/ 2. For the animations themselves, you could have more customization options. For instance, adding the support for text cards or different shapes. I think having the option to add text in the moving parts would be really helpful for this kind of use case.
- j45 10mo agoThis looks great. For the demo on the screen, it would be great to reveal each subgraph as a step before it all flows together. Is there any thought / plan / feasibility for adding a "reveal" type verb that could be placed between each subgraph to wait for a keypress to reveal the next subgraph? In the meantime, one could create 3 diagrams I guess of with one more subgraph added.
- n0um3n4 10mo agoHuh... I'm not being to login with github :/ it says 404: https://github.com/login/oauth/authorize?access_type=offline&client_id=Iv23li7vGs0F2LG9ps0e&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fclerk.fanfa.dev%2Fv1%2Foauth_callback&response_type=code&scope=read%3Auser+user%3Aemail&state=vqrpdg7j761rtwszbwpv14ph7gm9wtpndufl83lo https://github.com/login/oauth/authorize?access_type=offline...
- emmavis 10mo agoLooks good, can i animate just connection to clicked node?
- jadbox 10mo ago- how much is Pro and what does it do? - can I download as animated gif or mpeg4 to embed into slides?
- GrinningFool 10mo agoThe animations don't seem to be retained across nodes, which seems to make the animations pretty noise more than a means to convey useful information. For example in this simplified chart: flowchart LR subgraph Inputs A B end subgraph Middleware M end subgraph Outputs X Y end A --> M B --> M M --> X M --> Y G --> L end ``` The input animation colors are pink and green, but the next step (M->output) is blue and orange. I'd expect to see actual flow of usage/data (and if it included diagram syntax to specify message rates, etc that would be even better). So if there's a blue dot on the input side, I should be able to track that on the output side to its final destination.
- euroderf 10mo agoGo has a package to parse its own source. Use it to map a Go executable to Fanfa and then take a front row seat to watch your code execute.