The personal thing of yours, you must work for GSAP and
now something else, is not a good approach to evangelize
your brand.
I normally calmly address negative points people point out (there are some and they are being addressed), but that's not how you began the conversation at all. Instead you began with the comment "It makes famo.us look like the 80s." and no further content backing up that claim. When I challenged on your initial claim, I did so because I knew it could only be rooted in ignorance (i.e. never actually used famo.us) since the people I know who have spent time with both don't hold such beliefs.
My other comments on this thread were there to evangelize a tech product that I work on because it has merit. My comments to you are rooted in no such thing. Instead they are rooted in responding to behavior that is not forthcoming of mature intelligent discussion on HN. I've been in this community for a long time and participate regularly. I care very deeply about it and hate it when people treat it like reddit and lower the quality of discourse. With that in mind, my replies were my own and were composed on behalf of Hacker News and not my employer. It's not different than when a wikipedian challenges an obviously bogus claim on the talk page or with a "citation needed" superscript.
If you want to judge the a piece of technology based on my comments, you are free to do so (despite being very poor methodology). If you don't use famous, because of those replies, that's unfortunate for us both. However, if next time you comment on HN on any topic and choose to give pause and give more thought and consideration to what you write instead of mindless fanboi-ism, I will have considered it a worthy sacrifice.
Regarding the criticisms of the workflow. You're 100% correct. We don't have a workflow for designers or modelers. It's simply not ready for consumption by audiences who can't code. FWIW, our plan is to build out towards those audiences layer by layer since doing so keeps our platform far more extensible and usable by many audiences. If you built out for designers on day one, it's very hard to really be able to then build out lower level foundational APIs. If you instead take a unix philosophy approach, you can build out layer by layer like an onion and each layer can be made of composable parts.
This means that we'll eventually have a layer that makes it very easy to build out the designer tools on top. Not only that, whichever developers (in the company or from the community) build out the layers for designers and modelers, will be working at a higher level of abstraction that affords them more flexibility and speed when creating need features and exploring different directions.
Apple only achieved what they did with UIKit for iOS and AppKit for OS X because they had a very robust base called FoundationKit, that is built on top of Darwin/BSD.
If you play the short game and satisfy higher level customers instead of building out the right code infrastructure, you are more likely to create a platform that is short-lived and can't stand the test of time. Also, by building out for developers first, you create a community that can magnify your capabilities and reach since your initial core community has the skills to contribute back to the commons. If you skip this group, then you are on the hook for the majority of improvements to your platform because someone needs to be a senior developer to understand the code base all the way down to the lower levels.
One day we may have something that works for Maya or Blender. That day isn't today, and people who cannot code and need a capability like importing a model, should definitely go with GSAP. If on the other hand they can code, then they may find famo.us to be the more interesting platform. There's no silver bullet. Given the number of forks, followers and activity in the community so far, we think we've made the right decision by going developer first.
It's not really possible to make the judgement of "a few classic mistakes" until you've made an effort to understand the end-game. For example, if GSAP wanted to build out a true platform, then building out to designers and modelers first, IMHO represents "a few classic mistakes", but that's not their product and not their market, so they've done a great job in reaching that market today. I wish we could serve that market today, but we've made a conscious decision to play the long game here.
We don't think we're a solution looking for a problem, and given the play that smart investors[0] are looking for, we're pretty well positioned [0].
We are going in circles. You need to realize that just because someone disagrees with you does not mean that they are a bad community member. I'm not getting paid for essays or to PR. I predict your corp will fail, prove me wrong.
You agree that ad/agencies won't use it as it does not work for designers, game companies won't use it as it does not work with model pipeline. I repeat that should you guys fail, it makes other tech founders look bad to other investors, and that affects me. You should have done lean process.
My other comments on this thread were there to evangelize a tech product that I work on because it has merit. My comments to you are rooted in no such thing. Instead they are rooted in responding to behavior that is not forthcoming of mature intelligent discussion on HN. I've been in this community for a long time and participate regularly. I care very deeply about it and hate it when people treat it like reddit and lower the quality of discourse. With that in mind, my replies were my own and were composed on behalf of Hacker News and not my employer. It's not different than when a wikipedian challenges an obviously bogus claim on the talk page or with a "citation needed" superscript.
If you want to judge the a piece of technology based on my comments, you are free to do so (despite being very poor methodology). If you don't use famous, because of those replies, that's unfortunate for us both. However, if next time you comment on HN on any topic and choose to give pause and give more thought and consideration to what you write instead of mindless fanboi-ism, I will have considered it a worthy sacrifice.
Regarding the criticisms of the workflow. You're 100% correct. We don't have a workflow for designers or modelers. It's simply not ready for consumption by audiences who can't code. FWIW, our plan is to build out towards those audiences layer by layer since doing so keeps our platform far more extensible and usable by many audiences. If you built out for designers on day one, it's very hard to really be able to then build out lower level foundational APIs. If you instead take a unix philosophy approach, you can build out layer by layer like an onion and each layer can be made of composable parts.
This means that we'll eventually have a layer that makes it very easy to build out the designer tools on top. Not only that, whichever developers (in the company or from the community) build out the layers for designers and modelers, will be working at a higher level of abstraction that affords them more flexibility and speed when creating need features and exploring different directions.
Apple only achieved what they did with UIKit for iOS and AppKit for OS X because they had a very robust base called FoundationKit, that is built on top of Darwin/BSD.
If you play the short game and satisfy higher level customers instead of building out the right code infrastructure, you are more likely to create a platform that is short-lived and can't stand the test of time. Also, by building out for developers first, you create a community that can magnify your capabilities and reach since your initial core community has the skills to contribute back to the commons. If you skip this group, then you are on the hook for the majority of improvements to your platform because someone needs to be a senior developer to understand the code base all the way down to the lower levels.
One day we may have something that works for Maya or Blender. That day isn't today, and people who cannot code and need a capability like importing a model, should definitely go with GSAP. If on the other hand they can code, then they may find famo.us to be the more interesting platform. There's no silver bullet. Given the number of forks, followers and activity in the community so far, we think we've made the right decision by going developer first.
It's not really possible to make the judgement of "a few classic mistakes" until you've made an effort to understand the end-game. For example, if GSAP wanted to build out a true platform, then building out to designers and modelers first, IMHO represents "a few classic mistakes", but that's not their product and not their market, so they've done a great job in reaching that market today. I wish we could serve that market today, but we've made a conscious decision to play the long game here.
We don't think we're a solution looking for a problem, and given the play that smart investors[0] are looking for, we're pretty well positioned [0].
[0] https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/462476067463102465