Think of Haiku as a design portal to your team's codebase. Use Haiku to: * Design imaginative UI components * Snap them into existing codebases (Web, iOS, Android) * Then keep iterating on them from your design tools, hand-in-hand with developers Haiku helps your team build your product, together.
Super excited for this launch! It's been a long time in the making... and it's about time designer-developers had a powerful animation tool to replace Flash that also can update components and spit out native code, right to the browser. Of course, the thought behind this product goes way deeper than that, but that's my initial reaction.
What a great time to be a designer! (And a developer!)
@zackaboo — can you tell us a little more about your personal motivation and inspiration to tackle this opportunity?
Thanks @chrismessina !
Designer-developer collaboration is tough. Having been a designer, developer, and manager of designers & developers through my career, I've suffered this pain from many angles.
The core of the problem is: design and dev tools speak different languages. Though designers' and developers' output is both 'pixels,' they're 'different pixels'. If they could only speak a common language, then we could design, code, and design again.
Haiku is a design tool built on a common language — our design file format _is code_ (open source, too: https://github.com/HaikuTeam/core ), so as designers design, we can e.g. track changes with git, and let them "publish" (git push) with a click to share their designed components with developers. Developers can then install designed components with npm/yarn, or pull the latest with git. This foundation enables some crazy stuff, like live-reloading a codebase while making changes in Sketch.
Though we've been building Haiku in a closed beta for 18 months, today's just the beginning! We have so much ahead on our roadmap, but we're excited to finally open the gates and invite folks to take Haiku for a spin.
I gave it a try, but I found the way of making the animations are just too clunky compared to tools like Principle (it isn't really straightforward, for example, many times I need to work backward from the end result, instead of thinking how it should be done from the start) and the interactions are slightly unpolished from what I experienced. Any thoughts on that?
Definitely wanted a tool that can do some simple animation that can export to Lottie (besides After Effect), so I really hope this tool can continue to grow and fill this gap!
Hey @taylorling , thanks for taking the time to share your feedback. There are definitely some rough edges that we continue to polish, but we decided it was worth launching sooner than later. We've seen from our closed-beta users that Haiku is plenty-usable today for the Lottie-style animation use-case — so, might as well get it out there for these users and then keep on working.
A lot of folks (now including you!) have requested the ability to take two different artboards from Sketch and auto-tween between them, for example — so this is something we're working on.
All of this said, we feel strongly about the foundation that we've laid. A timeline gives precise control of every property for every element — much easier to build up from there than the other way around. If you can make any pixel any value at any time — you can create any UI. Re: interactions (especially the code editor for Actions) — yes, this is the newest, most-beta feature-set in the product, and an area we expect will be maturing drastically over the coming months.
TL;DR we're obsessively working on it. This ain't an easy product for a small team. :) I hope we see you around again sometime soon!
Why again an ONLINE service, instead of just letting me do my stuff locally? Hoped to be a replacement for Figma.
Is there any plans for me to pay once (or something), but let me keep my (and company's) files away from your servers?
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Congratulations on the first launch! Been using this in beta and I can assure it's the tool that we have been waiting for... finally!
So excited to try this product out! I tried a similar product called BuilderX from GeekyAnts and it was a bit underwhelming (albeit I beta tested, so it could be better now). The integration with Sketch is HUGE! Thanks!
Osaurus
Crow.app
Fabulous
Crow.app
WatchBuddy
Tempad
Diez
It's brillant.
Please don't do a monthly billing :(
Pros:Great Interface
Easy to understand (thanks to the tour guide)
Work with Sketch and React
It's free (but it can change I think)
Cons:Only for mac, for the moment
WatchBuddy