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by doctorpangloss 826 days ago
I'm not sure how intellectually honest that is.

The animation of the walking bird is 246kB MP4. Bigger than Rive, sure, but it essentially takes no heap or runtime, which is at least 195kB of WASM.

The walking bird animation could probably be optimized much further through automatic decisions that the encoders can take.

You shouldn't use either Lottie or Rive for static animations.
3 comments
lukan 825 days ago
"You shouldn't use either Lottie or Rive for static animations."

I guess that depends on your use case. If you only have this animation on your website, then probably no. But if you load and run the rive engine anyway, because you build a game with it - then why not also use it for "static animations", if the result can be way sharper?

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GlacierFox 826 days ago
What's a static animation?
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jokethrowaway 825 days ago
Probably he/she meant just a video file (as opposed to computing the vectors at runtime)
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corysama 825 days ago
I'm gonna guess they mean an animation that's the same every time you play it.
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filleduchaos 825 days ago
> The animation of the walking bird is 246kB MP4.

I mean, that fundamentally misses the point of vector graphics, no?

I could also argue that a screenshot of a rendered SVG icon takes no heap or runtime, which would also completely miss the point of why a designer would want vector icons. JPGs and MP4s alike are not infinitely scalable.

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doctorpangloss 825 days ago
Yeah, that’s correct. SVG is not a good delivery format, I agree. It is an excellent intermediate format, like a ProRes encoded video is.

It’s tough. We’re chatting on a website with no graphics besides a low resolution letter Y logo. The most exciting UX development maybe ever in the history of computing is a chat interface. On mobile, it’s all scrolling through rectangles. It’s not looking good for the designers.

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pavlov 825 days ago
> “It’s not looking good for the designers.”

Only if you think that the job of a designer in the software industry is to add graphics.

By similar logic, the past hundred years have been bad for architects because there are no more stone gargoyles added to buildings.

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