Ingo: Yeah, I'm here on the Open Source
Ingo: Summit Europe, and with me today are Brendan and Mattia from Lottie.
Ingo: So Brendan, maybe you can explain what is Lottie.
Brandon: Yeah, so Lottie is a vector animation format.
Brandon: It allows designers to easily author animation files in their tool of choice
Brandon: and then play them back on the platform of their choice.
Brandon: It just provides a really rich and seamless experience for designers.
Ingo: How is it different to other animation formats?
Mattia: So the most similar one is SVG because they're both vector animations.
Mattia: And they are quite similar in many regards.
Mattia: Lottie has a couple extra features to help with animation itself,
Mattia: but also has more editing tools and creation tools.
Mattia: So it's fairly easy to create a Lottie while with animated SVG,
Mattia: you don't have as many ways of creating your animations.
Ingo: And other formats, like, I don't know, animated JPEGs, it's totally different.
Mattia: Yeah, yeah, like those, like most people would be familiar with raster formats,
Mattia: which work on a grid of pixels, while vector formats instead have more like
Mattia: shapes, you have a description of what the shapes look like.
Mattia: The advantage is that you can scale infinitely, so it works well with UIs or anything responsive.
Ingo: Where is Lottie supported? Everywhere?
Brandon: Yeah, so Web, iOS, Android are the biggest platforms for Lottie.
Brandon: There's also some kind of language agnostic Lottie players out there that anyone
Brandon: can bring and integrate with into their system.
Ingo: And every browser is doing it?
Brandon: You can get the libraries. They're available for every browser,
Brandon: but they're not built into the browsers.
Ingo: Okay, but is this the plan?
Brandon: We'd love to get there. It's a very long road to get there. So that is the dream
Brandon: for us to be built into every browser.
Mattia: So now there are
Ingo: A new Lottie spec or the first version of the Lottie spec. What is in there? What is defined there?
Brandon: So in that, we have a lot of the common features in Lottie.
Brandon: So we have different shapes, different ways of coloring them,
Brandon: how to arrange the shapes, bring them together.
Mattia: Yeah, basically the Lottie, the whole pre-existing Lottie had a lot of different
Mattia: features, but not every player implemented them.
Mattia: So for the 1.0 specs, we decided to only standardize the very minimum that everyone
Mattia: supported as a baseline, and then we can build on them.
Mattia: So basically we have the basic shapes, color and gradients, and like raster
Mattia: image layers. Because I think that's basically it for Dev 1.0.
Ingo: What tools can I use to create Lottie files?
Mattia: So there's Lottie files creator. There's Adobe After Effects,
Mattia: which is the original. There's Lottie Labs. There's Glaximate.
Mattia: I think there's several others. There's also Jitter, which is not for animation
Mattia: themselves, but to make websites that use Lottie.
Mattia: So there's a lot of different tools.
Ingo: So for every platform, so whether I'm on Linux, Mac OS, I can use one of those.
Mattia: Yeah, there's also like web editors as well. So any platform you can find something.
Ingo: What would you, for a beginner, what would you choose?
Mattia: Well, I would choose Glaxonimate because it's the one I developed.
Mattia: I also work for Lottifiles. I should say that you use Lottifiles Creator.
Ingo: Yeah that's a plasma kde plasma project right okay it's a it's a kde project yeah.
Mattia: Recently joined a kde we haven't had a full kde release yet because there's
Mattia: a lot of work of porting to the kde libraries and such but we're getting there
Ingo: Okay what are the challenges getting laddie out there at the moment how to i
Ingo: don't know get involved with the community.
Brandon: I haven't think of that one for a minute i think as a designer
Brandon: you know it's just learning animation and how to work with it into your tool
Brandon: chain for developers if you're interested i think it's just you know finding
Brandon: the use cases that aren't supported yet and then join the community like do
Brandon: some development just connecting people together i think is one of the biggest
Brandon: challenges right now also
Mattia: I think i can add something to that like the reason why established we established
Mattia: the Lottie animation community to standardize it was that different players
Mattia: supported slightly different versions of Lottie.
Mattia: And so there was a point of friction where maybe a designer would write a Lottie
Mattia: and then when they were testing it was working fine, but maybe on mobile would
Mattia: look slightly different because it didn't have all the features.
Mattia: So we hope with the standardization process that everyone will render everything the same way.
Ingo: There's also validator tools you provide.
Brandon: Yeah, and the validator tools will give developers and sometimes even designers
Brandon: like a really great way to check the Lotties that are being authored to make
Brandon: sure that they conform to the specification they can provide.
Brandon: And, you know, with that, the next step is once your Lottie is confirmed,
Brandon: be conforming, then the players can be confident that they're playing things
Brandon: back that the way that they should be.
Ingo: Where can I find you guys if I want to engage? I don't know.
Ingo: Is there a chat, a community? Where do I go to?
Brandon: Yeah, so loti.github.io. that's our main spec page and that will have linked
Brandon: to the roadmap to the docs to discussion forums like everything you want to
Brandon: learn about Lottie like that's the starting point okay thanks a lot thank you