Launched on November 25th, 2020
Built for designers and developers, Flow lets you easily animate designs and generate production-ready code that a developer can use right away. Import Sketch Designs. Make Animations. Export Dev-ready Code.
Just testing it but initial reactions are terrific. Just open your app, click the graphic bar at the base of your screen & you are off - accurate spelling & typing too! Lovely.
I had high hopes for this software - that it would be a great alternative to the more expensive Adobe products. However, I find the key frame logic very counter intuitive and fiddly to adjust positions, motion and objects due to key frame complexity. In the past I was quite a maestro of Flash animation and also Adobe Animate which is essentially a re-packaging of Flash (with bugs and no updates). I ask myself - why can't somebody just resurrect Flash? It did everything this package is trying to do but with solid keyframe behaviour. I did not find that it dealt with imports very well and did not succeed at importing any of my Figma animations. In the end, with perserverence and many references to video guidance, I managed to create all the animations I required for the product I was working on, but not without a lot of frustration and fiddling.
I'm trying to do some exploding icons where initial menu icons break into parts to give users a clear and continual hint as to how the UI works, rather than an onboarding screen. (Totally inspired by Canva's "more" button becoming a close X).
Just quickly putting a couple of artboards together from my design doc and playing with it in Flow has let me realise things about the UI much faster than my imagined presentation.
My biggest concern right now is how to combine the generated code because I want to have four different menu buttons with their own animations - lots of room for tutorial articles.