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Thanks, the demos are amazing on Chrome, but slow on firefox 29. I guess they will fix it in the next release. The physics engine is impressive, but I hope it w

by matt42 12y ago

Thanks, the demos are amazing on Chrome, but slow on firefox 29. I guess they will fix it in the next release. The physics engine is impressive, but I hope it will add not to much code complexity. Let's see next month how are the first apps built with famo.us.

malandrew 12y ago
Actually as the first engineer (but one working on backend stuff, not the platform), I've actually be shocked at how little complexity it adds. At the end of the day all the animations are accomplished by passing in the function for the animation you want. That means that making an animation is just a matter of setting the coefficients on the function you pass in to the thing being animation. It's amazingly well decoupled. Also, if you give us more details on the slow demo, we'll look into improving it on the browser you're using. What operating system? What browser? What demo? etc.
- matt42 12y ago
  Do you also test famo.us on low-end smarphones ? The famo.us videos I found show smooth results on high end smartphones like the nexus 5. It would be interessting to see if we can the same performances of low-end smartphones. About the slow demo. It was tentacule, runing on firefox 29, archlinux with a i5-2500k processor.
  - malandrew 12y ago
    Processing power usually is not the issue. What we don't work well with are browsers that either don't support the HTML5 APIs we rely on (CSS 3D matrices, perspective, backface visibility, preserve-3d, etc) or have very buggy implementations of those APIs. Old versions of the Android browser for example don't work for this reason. If those browser APIs we need are present and they are properly implemented, then Famo.us generally runs comparably/competitively to native apps on the same device. However, at the end of the day, we're skating to where the puck is going. Low-end devices from 1-2 years ago don't worry us too much because devices often get replaced with contracts and recent announcements show that feature phones are all soon going to be decent smartphones. The days of dumb phones are numbered. That's the world we're preparing for. If I was founding a startup today, I'd be looking at the myriad greenfield opportunities out there that are only doable with apps that can be perform comparably to native and be launched by a link. The category of ephemeral apps in particular will take off in the next year or so.
    - matt42 12y ago
      I agree. In two years, things will be completely different, webgl and CSS3D will be supported by a majority of mobile devices and a nexus5-like phone will cost 100$. But today is a different story, and if your app is usable only on flagship devices, this is a severe disadvantage. It would interesting to see a study showing what are the smartphone used today, and if the majority are high end - low end or middle end. It would help us to know what kind of resources an app to be released will have to deal with.
      - matt42 12y ago
        Actually: http://www.antutu.com/en/view.shtml?id=7834 http://www.antutu.com/en/view.shtml?id=7834
      - malandrew 12y ago
        Every iOS app is only usable on a high end device from one manufacturer. Being limited to a market that includes all of the iOS market and a lot of the Android market, plus desktops/laptops, TVs, etc. is a pretty huge market market even without the feature phones.

by matt42 12y ago

malandrew 12y ago

Actually as the first engineer (but one working on backend stuff, not the platform), I've actually be shocked at how little complexity it adds. At the end of the day all the animations are accomplished by passing in the function for the animation you want. That means that making an animation is just a matter of setting the coefficients on the function you pass in to the thing being animation. It's amazingly well decoupled. Also, if you give us more details on the slow demo, we'll look into improving it on the browser you're using. What operating system? What browser? What demo? etc.

matt42 12y ago
Do you also test famo.us on low-end smarphones ? The famo.us videos I found show smooth results on high end smartphones like the nexus 5. It would be interessting to see if we can the same performances of low-end smartphones. About the slow demo. It was tentacule, runing on firefox 29, archlinux with a i5-2500k processor.
- malandrew 12y ago
  Processing power usually is not the issue. What we don't work well with are browsers that either don't support the HTML5 APIs we rely on (CSS 3D matrices, perspective, backface visibility, preserve-3d, etc) or have very buggy implementations of those APIs. Old versions of the Android browser for example don't work for this reason. If those browser APIs we need are present and they are properly implemented, then Famo.us generally runs comparably/competitively to native apps on the same device. However, at the end of the day, we're skating to where the puck is going. Low-end devices from 1-2 years ago don't worry us too much because devices often get replaced with contracts and recent announcements show that feature phones are all soon going to be decent smartphones. The days of dumb phones are numbered. That's the world we're preparing for. If I was founding a startup today, I'd be looking at the myriad greenfield opportunities out there that are only doable with apps that can be perform comparably to native and be launched by a link. The category of ephemeral apps in particular will take off in the next year or so.
  - matt42 12y ago
    I agree. In two years, things will be completely different, webgl and CSS3D will be supported by a majority of mobile devices and a nexus5-like phone will cost 100$. But today is a different story, and if your app is usable only on flagship devices, this is a severe disadvantage. It would interesting to see a study showing what are the smartphone used today, and if the majority are high end - low end or middle end. It would help us to know what kind of resources an app to be released will have to deal with.
    - matt42 12y ago
      Actually: http://www.antutu.com/en/view.shtml?id=7834 http://www.antutu.com/en/view.shtml?id=7834
    - malandrew 12y ago
      Every iOS app is only usable on a high end device from one manufacturer. Being limited to a market that includes all of the iOS market and a lot of the Android market, plus desktops/laptops, TVs, etc. is a pretty huge market market even without the feature phones.