Rive

Another gorgeous design tool — for building functional, interactive and animated assets. Curious how this compares with After Effects?

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.

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