I think I know what's going on. A web dev 101 class has discovered this thread. This explains some bizarre questions such as "what is the licensing" and "won't work on mobile"... :-)
The Animista web app is meant for web developers to browse the animations, take the very basic CSS code (not HTML) and use it in their projects - which might be mobile-friendly if you wish.
CSS animation is not "mobile or not", that task belongs to your other site-wide CSS and general HTML structure.
Calling developers checking HN on their phones "web dev 101" is pretty condescending. Give the benefit of the doubt, and assume they are engineers with limited time to check out new technology and are disappointed that they can't view these animations while riding a bus.
I was responding to the person who said they didn't have confidence using the CSS in their mobile projects because the site where they got the code from didn't work on mobile. That's not the logic of an engineer!
It's like saying you don't trust the drone will fly above 10 feet because in the store where you bought it the test flight was limited by a 10 foot ceiling.
> It's like saying you don't trust the drone will fly above 10 feet because in the store where you bought it the test flight was limited by a 10 foot ceiling.
That sounds like the happy expectations of someone free of the merciless grasp of deceitful vendors…
This is more like the store refusing to make the video demo of the drone on flight available to visitors using a mobile browser.
If you have Firefox for Android you can tap "request desktop site" if you really wanted to see the site on your phone. If you have an iPhone, I guess you're out of luck.
I just checked and while it loads on iPad, the top row of round buttons for animation category don't respond to touch.
Back to the analogy... it's more than a "demo drone video". It's an interactive drone experience where you select altitude and other settings and see the drone in virtual flight, then copy those settings to your own controller. Sounds like a task for a computer, not a phone.
Your analogy doesn't make sense. The site shows animations which work on mobile, but won't let people on phones view the animations. That puts up a barrier to adoption: even if there are a ton of fiddly UI widgets to control the animation, the mobile site could show a default animation & say, "click here to customize this animation (desktop recommended, lots of controls that don't work well with touch)".
Close... Product Manager (former Engineer) with 20+ years experience building things.
"You're either mobile first, or you're mobile last."
If someone puts up a warning sign telling me that they didn't bother to test their code on mobile... that tells me it's not ready for production yet. I don't want to get bogged down in something that wasn't tested on mobile, or that requires me to invest a lot of my time to get working right between browsers. Having the creator of this code put up a page saying not to use it on a phone seems to say they are comfortable writing off more than 50% of web users.
I don't think it's OK to launch anything, not even an MVP, if it doesn't work on mobile. Shouldn't building a mobile site be a trivial task for someone building CSS animations? How do I trust their work without a way to preview it?
The former engineer seems to be missing the point.
All this site does is present existing CSS animation methods in a convenient, curated fashion with nice variations such as "wobble left". We know it works on mobile because the code is written according to the CSS spec.
If you have doubts about whether the CSS animation works on mobile, then you have doubts about whether the CSS animation spec in general works on mobile.
Developers don't copy and paste and write code on their mobile phones. Therefore the target audience is not your "50% of web users" club, which is a consumption stat, not coding or technical productivity/creating.
The code that you take from this site goes to your own project, and that's when you test on mobile - with your own HTML elements and other code.
Finally, "mobile first" is not right. Nothing should be "first" because by definition everything else is given less priority which is flawed logic depending on the application. "Mobile-friendly" is the more sensible idea.
You are not entitled to "Mobile First" just because a conga line of over-memed industry bloggers repeatedly insist we are entitled to all the content on the internet through our mobile browsers.
You're waving your phone around like it's attached permanently to your hand, and the only way you can get online!
The site responds and tells you what's going on. There is no fault. Be patient, be cool, save the bookmark and check it our later.
Don't be the kid throwing a tantrum because the hand-me-down phone you got for Christmas doesn't run Pokemon Go.
Screen size is an inherent limitation of mobile, always will be. Video editing, photo-editing, anything requiring a complex interface on a single page, or anything the developer hasn't released yet for reasons which are their business.
Giving release priority to desktop (including laptop) for a technical development app is OKAY in 2017. Just breath, everything is okay. The site is trustworthy, the code is trustworthy.
The Animista web app is meant for web developers to browse the animations, take the very basic CSS code (not HTML) and use it in their projects - which might be mobile-friendly if you wish.
CSS animation is not "mobile or not", that task belongs to your other site-wide CSS and general HTML structure.