The Rive editor lets you design graphics that can react, animate, and change themselves at any moment. Now it's available as a blazing-fast macOS desktop app.
Congrats guys! Rive is a killer app for all kind of animations. Personally I've used it to design icon animations and the result was amazing. As a product designer with almost none motion design/animation experience, Rive is pretty easy to learn. It's a lot easier to learn after effects!
Congratulations on the launch of Rive for macOS! I'm excited to experience the power and speed of the desktop app. Looking forward to the amazing graphics I can create!
Hey Product Hunt, I'm Guido and I co-founded Rive with @luigi82. He's a dev, I'm a designer. We're identical twins and we've been building products together since we were kids. We like to say design and development are twin competencies! Thanks to @chrismessina for hunting us! 🙌
Today, the Rive editor comes to macOS as a blazing-fast desktop app.
🚀 A new graphics format for the interactive era
At its core, Rive is a new graphics format. It’s a type of graphic that can react, animate, and change itself at any moment. The format and its players are open. As a business, we offer a suite of design and dev tools to support it.
🤔 The problem
Current design tools are still stuck in the old media world. They primarily export static formats (like .png, .jpg, .svg, .pdf, .psd), which are all rooted in the world of print. Even video formats are just a sequence of frames, originally designed to be printed on film. But most of the graphics we consume nowadays run in software. Browsers, apps, car dashboards, TVs, games… they’re all software. Unlike print, software is interactive. It can change state at any moment while it’s running. Graphics formats and the tools to create them haven’t caught up. These days, designers use tools like Figma or After Effects to mock up different states, but then the effort of building something functional is handed off to developers.
⚡ New tools for our runtime world
It’s time for a new format with new tools – built specifically for this purpose. It’s called runtime, and it’s what Rive is all about.
🎨 Rive Editor
The Rive editor lets you create functional graphics that are interactive, animated, and ready to ship. It empowers designers to think more like devs. At the same time, it frees up engineering resources, not requiring a dev to be involved in every design iteration. This allows you to be wildly creative while rapidly iterating.
🤖 Rive Runtimes
Rive’s players, which we call runtimes, let you load and control the graphics you build in the Rive editor. They’re open-source libraries that are available for most major platforms (including web, iOS, macOS, Android, Windows, Flutter, React Native, and more). We also offer no-code integrations (like our Framer integration and our Share Links). These use our runtimes under the hood, but you interact with them through visual tools that don’t require any programming knowledge.
💭 Sounds a bit like Flash?
The fundamental concept of Flash, which was fantastic and a huge inspiration for Rive, is that it let you build, experiment, and iterate on experiences that were ready to run. It combined the design tool with the runtime format. Rive has a few fundamental differences:
- Rive's format and runtimes are open-source.
- Rive's runtime gets packaged into your app/site. Flash was a plugin that the user had to install.
- Rive’s performance and light weight allow you to easily use it either for the whole experience or just for components of a larger runtime experience (e.g., embed in native iOS apps).
- Rive uses standards across all our supported platforms, with the ability to abstract the renderer.
This is a seriously underrated tool. It's capable of some great results, and is snappy and highly flexible. Adobe should either be scared or reaching for their wallet. Well done, team 👏👏👏
I've used Rive many times now to create animations – it's become my go-to tool.
big shout out to @luigi82 and @guidorosso and team for the great product, and congrats on the launch!
Hi @laurieherault ! While we don't have a SolidJS library yet, you can use the base JS/TS runtime library in your SolidJS app today. Check out this experiment (code in thread):
https://twitter.com/ZachPlata/st...
Does this support aWebP (animated WebP) as an export format?
Caniuse.com states 96% browser support and Shopify lets you use this asset just like any jpg or gif. The weak link in the chain is asset creation of animated assets in an easy-to-handle format with efficient compression
PS: Bonus points for animated Avif but that’s not as universally supported yet
@maximilian_bredow@guidorosso's answer refers to the Rive Runtime format supporting WebP inside of a .riv file. For exporting linear content (.riv as a video/etc), we have a Cloud Renderer which currently supports MP4, Gif, or PNG sequence. Animated WebP would be good to add that list!
@maximilian_bredow@luigi82 We also support exporting WebM videos, which support transparency. Agree with Luigi that we can add WebP as a Cloud Renderer export option, especially since we're already supporting it at runtime.
👏 Congratulations on the launch of Rive on Product Hunt! 🎉 I'm Paolo, a software developer and maker, and this new graphics format is incredibly exciting! I've been trying out the new desktop app and loving it so far. I'm wondering if there's any way to easily export the graphics I create in Rive into other formats like PNG, JPEG, or SVG? Thanks for all your hard work and for bringing this awesome new format to life! 🤩