Steve Newcomb

Famous - Design, publish, & track live web apps without coding

Famous is a design tool that enables designers to create, share, & publish stunning live mobile, tablet, and desktop experiences without coding. Share your designs live without needing to install anything on any device. Publish to any domain.

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Chally Meeker
Famous is a familiar design tool, but with an edge. It allows Designers to push straight to Production. In essence many Designers can become that "Unicorn" that the design industry always talks about. There are some guidelines to follow with setting up your art boards, which help Famous publish out Progressive Web Apps, but other than that it works as advertised. There are no more surprises for the Designer once the project is rendered in code. Whatever he/she designed is what makes it to production. The great part about frameworks like Bootstrap was that it was able to get working code into Production quickly, however it did have some limitations, and caveats if you wanted to use it without heavy customizations. Now, with Famous, you can get the speed of using a framework, but the freedom of a custom design. As an early adopter of the software, I can also attest to the speed in which the software is enhanced. The team at Famous have been crushing bugs, and adding new features on a weekly basis. As their brand-star suggests, they are also highly transparent and very accessible. To be honest, I'm not sure they sleep. I recommend Famous for any Designer that doesn't know how, or have the time to code their own projects. Famous will get a bit pricey for individual designers once the product comes out of beta. I would recommend that you sign up for the early bird pricing, unless you have a large budget, or an agency to foot the bill.
Steve Newcomb
@chally_meeker Thanks Chally, much appreciated. You've been a great alpha and beta member of our community and you've been great at helping us identify and track down the bugs. We'll be at it every day making sure we provide you with a trustworthy product.
Devon Bradley
@chally_meeker Thanks so much for the kind words! You're exactly right, we don't sleep much, but feedback like this makes it all worth it. We appreciate you 😊
Steve Newcomb
Hello Product Hunters! 👋 Hey it's @stevenewcomb and @marklu from Famous and we are really excited to introduce you to Famous, a brand new design tool that enables you to import, design, animate, preview, and publish beautiful mobile, tablet, and desktop experiences without any coding at all. Famous the first end to end comprehensive design tool that requires no coding and produces beautiful professional experiences that work on every device. --- HERE'S WHAT WE HOPE YOU'll LOVE ABOUT US --- Beauty Beauty is most important cultural value. Our product, our culture, our code, and all of designs are centered around beauty. It is our most fundamental value and it drives everything we do. We hope that when you try Famous you can see that we worked tirelessly to make every animation, every interaction, and every feature in Famous beautiful. Empathy Our greatest strength is that we are a design lead company. Our CEO is a designer and has great empathy for the problems that designers face every day in their work flows. Our designers actively use nearly every design tool, prototyping tool, collaboration tool and also learn and use CGI tools and advanced music production tools to really understand art, design, and workflow from every possible angle. Thought Leadership While we listen to our community, we also see it as our responsibility to solve our communities greatest pain points with revolutionary thinking. For example, we understood that requiring a person to download a "viewer" app on a phone to see a preview was a major blocker to client relationships and team collaboration and we invented a live preview that enables designers not only show their creations to clients and team members without downloading any software, they could design live on any phone shared into the preview. Approachability We are designers and we love being part of the community. We really value being SUPER accessible. So, we've implemented Slack directly inside of Famous so you can interact directly with the design community, with our engineers, or our designers, and even our CEO any time you'd like. Magic One of the things you'll see in Famous is simply it's pure magic. For example our live preview let's you design live on your phone, your team's phones, your clients phones, and even at a live event to up to 250,000 phones without requiring anyone to install any preview software on their phones. It's just one of many magical moments packed inside our software. 🙏 We’d love to get some feedback and we're happy to answer questions! - Steve & Mark
Micah Boswell
I've been using Famous since early Alpha. The product itself is a game-changer for visual storytellers. The product rollout and alpha testing has been exemplary, with a design, QA and support team that is passionate and brilliant.
Steve Newcomb
@micahboswell Thanks Micah. It's been a pleasure having you as one of our very first users. Whenever I'm tired and I haven't slept and I'm feeling totally burnt out, I just pull up your Instant Story you did and I get all the energy I need. You rock and keep up the really creative work with Famous.
Devon Bradley
@micahboswell thank you for the kind words! Your early alpha Lookback videos consistently brought joy to the office and there were definitely days that we needed it. We appreciate you 😊
Micah Boswell
@stevenewcomb You're a true craftsman - I'm honored that I've had a chance to help you and your team out. You have a grand vision, and that vision is desperately needed by the design community. You fight the good fight - happy to help in any way I can.
Micah Boswell
@dbradleyfl Absolutely, good sir. I'm a huge believer in the work you and your team have done. Drinks on me the next time I'm in SF - would enjoy taking you and steve out for a pint or two!
Steve Newcomb
@micahboswell Thank you sir.
Anna Rys
I haven't used it myself yet but our UI Designer is quite mesmerized with the possibilities of the app 🙂. Even if we just use it to prepare animations that our developers can later implement – it seems well worth it. Haven't tested everything yet, so can't give more specific feedback but Famous is definitely something that can make our product team's lives easier.
Steve Newcomb
@rysanna Thanks Anna, I can't wait to see what you do with Famous. It's been really exciting to finally launch after so many years of development. If you have any questions at all, just hit me up in our public Slack Channel that's built into Famous - just click the Slack icon in the lower left of the ribbon and you can reach me, any of our engineers, or any of our QA team.
Anna Rys
@stevenewcomb Thanks! And thanks for Famous 😄.
Ivanisawesome
I'm a designer that really doesn't want to learn to code. I really like the ability of what Famous is offering but I'm too unfamiliar with whether or not it is something I can actually use to produce "apps" - a lot of the focus is on the impressive transitions. Is this a prototyping tool or a tool which will allow me to deploy actual finished web apps? Can I convert these web apps into native apps if need be? Looking forward to any feedback - I'm sitting on the fence with this one and don't want to miss out on the discount launch price!
Kiran Kumar
@ivanisawesome You echo my thoughts. But I also think this. Whatever I can do with Webflow now, I can do it (or soon enough) on Famous way more easily and sooner. So I am taking that discounted price. I am one of the alpha users and I can vouch too that the team is super responsive to features and bugs.
Steve Newcomb
@ivanisawesome Hey Ivan great questions. In the beta, most people are using Famous as a prototyping tool or a tool to build static web experiences that they do publish. However, this is only the beta, and we will be releasing data bound components and the ability to code inside of Famous directly against our APIs. Our vision is that designers, engineers, and marketers can all work inside of one environment that produces product apps and web experiences. Let me know if I answered you question in full. Happy to go in detail if you want - but it may be helpful to watch our YouTube videos - I show where we are going with God Mode, Coding, and many other things. You can see the videos here - https://www.youtube.com/channel/...
Steve Newcomb
@ivanisawesome @kkirank Thanks Kiran, I can't wait to see what you do with Famous. I really appreciate you investing in Famous and we're doing everything we can to make sure the investment is worth it for you. I know it's a huge decision to adopt a new design tool and I really appreciate it.
Ivanisawesome
I appreciate your feedback @stevenewcomb One last question from me; I just saw via Facebook that the free beta has been extended to mid April. Will this apply to the pricing as well or will the price go up at the end of the month? Thanks again.
Steve Newcomb
@ivanisawesome out current launch plan is change the discount from 60% to 30% at the beginning of April 1-15, then we go to full price. However, once we hit April 15th, we will be offering the ability to choose monthly or yearly payments and we will also offer 10, 30 and 100 pack licenses with 10%, 20%, and 30% discounts respectively.
Lana
Thank you for developing this wonderful product. I do have a "stupid" question. If I use Famous, even though it's working, live web experience, it's still just a prototype, right? In other words, it still needs to be developed to be fully functional and so on, right? How do you explain to all the stakeholders about ROI on the custom animation and how do you get developers to buying into doing extra customization which will require more time on their part to achieve?
Steve Newcomb
@tbs_lana Thanks for your question. OK, so here it goes - I'll do my best to answer your question in full. Right now while Famous is in beta, I'd say that most people are using us as a better prototyping tool and the feedback we're getting so far is that it's way better than the alternatives, especially because of the awesome animations, live preview, and live sharing without needing any software on phones. So for now think of Famous as a perfect companion product for Sketch or AdobeXD where you import your designers, animate them, and the share and publish the result to anyone. However, what we are working on adding in the full product is the following: - Data-aware components - UX components - God Mode (Web + WebGL animations with 3D physics) - Open API Access with Live Coding inside of Famous In short, we are heavily inspired by Unity 3D, but the twist is we've made Famous really approachable for designers and with the APIs, really accessible for engineers. Our vision is that designers, engineers, and marketers can all participate collaboratively inside of Famous to dramatically reduce the time it takes to create things. I recently did a video of creating a web experience that took a consultancy 3 months to create and I did it in 3 minutes - it's the video at the top of the page. My hope is that within 6 months we've added many of the bulleted features above. Did this answer your question. I'm happy to keep going, but I thought I'd break here to ask if my answer helps.
Miguel Oller
Those animations look very slick! Reminds me a lot of the great UX of Keynote. I've got a few questions: - Is the focus mostly on mobile apps that are indistinguishable from native apps or is there support to build full websites? - Can a developer extend what's available or is this targeted towards non-technical makes only? - Is it possible to layout items similar to how the DOM or is it all absolutely positioned like Sketch/Figma, etc? - Are there any plans to make the editor work on the browser? Looking forward to trying it out soon!
Steve Newcomb
@ollermi thanks for the question - that's a great one for everyone to read about. Question #1 - in a single .famous project you can design for mobile, tablet, desktop, and even TV all in one project. Question #2 - the beta is for non-technical creators, but we are planning on opening up our APIs and letting engineers code against our APIs and also download the source. Question #3 - Ha! Famous is actually a Website wrapped in Electron - so we could have it as a website. My question back to you is what's the advantage of doing that for you?
Miguel Oller
@stevenewcomb thanks for the quick reply! Haha, that's awesome. Electron is great! To be honest, I don't mind using native apps when necessary so having it be in the browser isn't a necessity. I was just curious 😁 With tools like Figma working 100% in the browser I'm always curious of new products that can achieve very good UX without requiring a download.
David Vargas
@stevenewcomb Hey Steve! Is Famous ever going to become a PWA itself? What do you think of PWAs vs Electron? Wouldn't it be easier for you to maintain just one version? I understand updates are easier too. The advantage for me would be that I would be able to use it on my Chromebook! Right now I'm thinking what to do in order to be able to start using it. Chromebooks have become very popular :), specially among students. I'm with @ollermi about web apps.
David Vargas
Think I got my answer with today's announcement:
Chally Meeker

Famous is a great tool for any Designer who either can't code, or doesn't have the time to code their designs.

Pros:

Offers something that other design tools don't.

Cons:

More capability for fringe cases like supporting Internet Explorer, or less common device sizes.

Mayra Mendonça
Amazing tool. As a graphic designer, to have one tool that Is able to accomplish all these tasks is a dream-come-true. 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
Steve Newcomb
@mayra_mendonca Thanks Mayra. It's so awesome to have such great people to be a part of the journey of Famous. It's been a long 8 years since we started this crazy thing and I'm just overwhelmed at the outpouring of support we are getting. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
⚡️
Thanks for sharing! Been following it for a long time 1) Are these for creating 'promos & ads' or 'FUNCTIONAL micro apps'. In other words, can Famous be used to create snazzy landing pages to get emails, have a countdown counter, location aware map, product listing from a database or stripe-connected single product purchases. --- If so, is it possible to copy/paste code into it (like stripe.js) 2) Can we download the exported html/js/css and host/edit it ourselves? Is it human editable or is it all minified/jumbled. 3) Figma support?
Steve Newcomb
@gooddesygn good questions. Right now most people are using us for either prototypes, landing pages, and ads or basically static bound content. However, we are beginning to add data-bound components to the mix: Here's the current status. - Stripe support -yes - Adding code - yes - Adding 3rd party widgets - yes - Form Field - yes as a widget - Data Bound components - coming - Full shopping card - coming - Map - yes, but as injected widget
Steve Newcomb
@gooddesygn Whoops didn't see the other two questions. Can you download the code: we don't have an export button, but you can always grab the JS, HTML, and associated CSS. In the Pro Gold version you can host on your domain as well. Figma Support - not currently but we are getting more and more people requesting this one. We originally thought we'd get more people requesting AdobeXD, but so far Figma seems to have a lot of traction. I think it's a great product and I could definitely see us integrating with it.
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