
Famo.us Demos - epaga
http://demo.famo.us/
======
camus2
This whole thing has been handled quite strangely. Let's compare with
angularjs or threejs.

These frameworks have been developped openly from the very beginning and grew
based on user's needs.

Here we have a project,that has received 2 million in funding,which is
great,yet it's completely opaque,with a closed beta (I signed for it,never got
anything but junk mail,no code to test whatsoever).

IMHO it qualifies as vaporware, an tech demo that looks great but with little
practical use.

~~~
OutThisLife
All these demos perform remarkably bad for 2 million.

~~~
tmikaeld
Indeed, not even on high-end smartphone does this produce over 10fps (Tested
on iPhone 5, Nexus 4, Samsung galaxy s4)

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puppetmaster3
2 years ago, it was cool.

Today #GSAP is the state of art, if you want futuristic UX, spend a few
minutes exploring this site UX:
[http://intothearctic.gp](http://intothearctic.gp) (get past 'start
exploring')

Today it is a solution looking for a problem and no market.

~~~
amasad
The animation on the site you linked to is very janky and that's part of the
problem with building mobile apps using web tech, it's really hard to get a
solid 60 fps. If these guys cracked the problem then there is definitely a
huge market for it.

~~~
danceonfire
Some of their demos run really bad on my machine. If they cracked the problem,
they aren't showing it yet.

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untog
Shrug. Yeah, some of this stuff looks great, but it's not doing anything that
wasn't possible before. The really important part is how it's structured, what
the code looks like, how you go about actually implementing any of these
features.

And famo.us appears to be in some kind of silly closed beta, so I'm not sure
what I can even evaluate here.

~~~
wildpeaks
The public beta starts on April 9th (they sent an announcement yesterday).

~~~
joezydeco
I'll believe it when I see it. Signed up for the beta list a whole year ago
and never heard back, other than very lengthy "developer updates" that had no
relevance to me. I've been bitbucketing the mails ever since.

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ldn_tech_exec1
I was a huge fan of famo.us until just now. Testing in iPhone4S, most of these
apps are super jittery (never continuously 60fps) and unresponsive to touch in
the browser, especially Yahoo Weather, which looks to be the only one complex
enough to resemble a full app.

At best, this is a very impressive "mobile web app" framework NOT a native
replacement. I would never trade up obj-c for cordoba/js if this is the kind
of inconsistent performance users will have to deal with... and btw I love
javascript.

I think steve is a phenomenal entrepreneur but may have built this launch up
way too much. Without their native wrapper and MVC this feels like it's going
to be a few years before it can rival native development.

~~~
lnanek2
weather is just a blank black screen on my Mac...doesn't even seem worth
pulling out a mobile to try

~~~
ldn_tech_exec1
None of these demos are for desktop, famo.us was built mobile first

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kmfrk
How viable are "clever" ccTLDs outside .com and .org? I've always wondered how
usable those domains are to people outside our small tech bubble.

Especially back when the .ly domains were all the rage, but also now that .io
have the same SEO as .com domains.

~~~
taternuts
I clever as this URL looks, I hate typing it. For some reason I always spell
it wrong, like famou.us

~~~
kmfrk
Yeah, there's a mental tax to domains like that beyond merely understanding
what they read.

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NicoJuicy
To be honest, their demo's seem confusing and don't feel "right" in an ux way.

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general_failure
Famo.us is a sad company that doesn't know how to die. All their sessions and
talk are just hype. I am guessing they built some fancy DSL at the end of the
day.

It is simply not possible to revolutionize HTML without changing/updating the
runtime. Sadly for us, the runtime WebView shipped as part of Android is super
underperformant. The one shipped with iOS is stripped of features and JIT.

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colemorrison
This looked fun back when I first started learning web development...

...then I started building real apps.

I can't imagine the practical application for this framework? By the time
you've built something, optimized it, and likely pulled your hair out getting
it to play right with all the forgotten things in web app demos (Ajax, data
persistence, security, etc), you probably could have done it native.
Additionally, at least by doing it native you'd know that browsers aren't
going to come along, update, and wipe out the framework.

Does anyone pay attention to user activity, experience stats? Trying yo
habitualize your users into using a web app, ESPECIALLY MOBILE, is a losing
battle. If social network giants can't get users on mobile web
apps.............therefore picking this framework isn't just building with new
tools. It's also trying to onboard users into something they typically avoid.

~~~
bhouston
With [http://Clara.io](http://Clara.io), we couldn't have done it natively and
have it run on Linux, Windows and OSX without a huge investments. Our target
is not mobile though.

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dimitar71
I don't understand the mentality of some devs around who just complain and
bitch.

Sorry to be blunt but I am fed up looking for updates of companies which ate
least try to change something and then see a long string of lazy-azz comments
from 'developers' who learn/know jquery and friends and world begins and ends
with this.

Apologies to those who don't bitch but try to see the big picture here.

Oh, and I am not presenting famo.us and native Android is my bread and butter.

But it does not lock me up in my small world of know-all and all-else-is-sh
__.

@ famo.us team Thank you guys, at least you are trying to change and expand
boundaries, companies like your and CodenameOne are the real attempt of small
shops to oppose these Google, Apple and Microsoft suckers who don't want to
change and will never change if it depends on them.

Keep trying, there are many developers who will back you up!

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hnriot
Not sure why all the complaints. Sure, on an iPhone 4 like some people seem to
be using these are going to be slow; just running iOS7 is sluggish on that
phone, but on my 5s the yahoo weather app was very impressive,
indistinguishable from the highly rated native app.

~~~
colemorrison
I'm on iPhone 5 and they run "okay." If a 3 year old, 2 million dollar
framework is already ruling out everything but the absolute newest devices,
what do they expect devs to use it for? Pet projects pretty much seem like the
only thing.

I can't imagine using this on something professional that targets a realistic
target population.

~~~
bhouston
> If a 3 year old, 2 million dollar framework is already ruling out everything
> but the absolute newest devices, what do they expect devs to use it for?

While I am not a defender of famo.us, the jury is still out, I think that
investing in a framework for the future, especially when the future comes so
quickly in the mobile space is fine. No one supports four year old devices,
not Android nor iOS, so no framework support is okay too. Frameworks need to
have their head in the future, especially if they require significant
investment to create.

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ilovecookies
Is this really that BIG? They started this project back in 2011 if I remember
correctly, and it never really took off. There are way better webgl
alternatives performance wise.

And yeah they haven't released a SDK yet as some people have mentioned here.

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izolate
Rise is the most beautiful thing I've seen.

~~~
sunir
Here's the iPhone app. [https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/rise-alarm-
clock/id577221529...](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/rise-alarm-
clock/id577221529?mt=8)

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jannes
Lightbox looks pretty great, but the non-native scrolling is a no-go.
Especially on mobile devices you expect the native inertia formula to be used
and not some contrived approximation.

~~~
ubercore
That's one of the main concerns I have with it. They're really hanging their
hat on the fact that they implemented a physics engine so they don't have to
rely on OS-native things like inertia, so it works the same everywhere.
Problem is, even if it's consistent in famo.us, nobody likes random things to
feel "off" in the manner you bring up. Seems like a lot of effort to do
something that most people won't like anyway.

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jonperl
I saw the link in the meteor tech talk but figured it was not for public
distribution. However now that it is in the wild, for the curious I have been
de-minifying the paper example to try and learn how to use famo.us.

[https://github.com/jperl/paper](https://github.com/jperl/paper)

Also I am not sure why there are all these haters. In the few days I have been
using it, I can see it is going to change mobile web app development entirely.
Really excited for the launch!

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Kiro
I thought famo.us was about using the DOM and CSS matrix3d but these examples
are just using a canvas element like you would expect. What is famo.us
exactly?

~~~
crucialfelix
I had the source open the whole time and only saw CSS 3d transforms. I'm on
chrome 33

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crucialfelix
Finally something that makes the fan go on my macbook 2GHz i7 Intel Iris Pro
1024 MB. I was starting to think this thing didn't even have a fan.

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onion2k
I really _want_ to like Famo.us. There's some really nice effects being
demonstrated, the fallbacks to older browser technologies are useful, and it
seems to make it really easy to develop new things. But... it's not really
anything that a combination of d3.js, three.js, rapheal.js, webaudiox,
dancer.js, etc can't do for free and without all the "secrecy" nonsense.

~~~
epaga
I think their idea tends to be to try and unify everything and provide a
"toolbelt" for developing with it. At least that is the impression I get when
I read their FAQ:
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aC461kM855a66SzFT_TG8sHp...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aC461kM855a66SzFT_TG8sHpQxqDWy-4yH2XfLBxtTk/preview?sle=true)

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superqd
Given the hype (from them), I was very underwhelmed with the demos. I then
remembered that this stuff is supposed to run well on phones (not the WebGL
stuff, obviously, at least for iPhones). So I ran it on my phone and several
of the demos stuttered / jerked a lot if you tried to use it while loading.
Though once they fully loaded, they ran really well (smoothly).

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zxexz
This is pretty, and a nice framework - but it needs a LOT of optimization
before it could be considered anywhere near usable.

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joshdance
People keep mentioning funding etc. Anyone have a link to a quick backstory
for these guys?

~~~
sgustard
[http://www.crunchbase.com/company/famo-
us](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/famo-us)

~~~
joshdance
Thanks.

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Touche
[http://famo.us](http://famo.us) Has a nice YouTube clip of someone's personal
site that looks quite impressive.... why is _that_ not one of the demos? Is
the video a fake?

~~~
ldn_tech_exec1
if you research the history of famo.us that was the app they were originally
funded to build, and took a ton of hacks and workarounds to achieve good HTML5
perf. Thats when they realised the opportunity for a famo.us-like framework
was necessary.

~~~
Touche
So is that app (in the YouTube video) using famo.us or not?

~~~
Geee
Where is the Youtube video? I don't find it.

~~~
Touche
[http://famo.us](http://famo.us)

There are two embedded youtube videos, the one on the left.

~~~
Geee
Oh, this is weird. It serves a different page for Firefox (no WebGL? No
WebKit?). There's a full page live demo of the periodic table (the another
video) on Chrome and Safari.

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nailer
2 seconds per frame on iPad.

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Geee
Yup, famo.us is like a 'rendering engine' for the web, not a traditional JS
app framework. I expect seeing architecture similar to game engines, such as
Unity.

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7schlaefer
[http://demo.famo.us/tweetus/](http://demo.famo.us/tweetus/) doesn't work on
my Android native browser

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brianchu
I'd like to point out that famo.us recently announced a public beta release
date of April 9th, with respect to the "secrecy" criticism.

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adrnsly
0/10 - learn to loading screen, wtf is this 1994

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pgsandstrom
Is it just me, or is mouse wheel the ONLY way to scroll in those lists? Not
even "page down" works.

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xixixao
Buttons are nicked from Windows Phone yet this is totally broken in WP IE10.

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LukaszB
"CodePen Evaluation License" in each app.js ?

~~~
gdne
All of the demos on this page have been available on codepen for months:
[http://codepen.io/befamous/](http://codepen.io/befamous/)

There's nothing new here.

