Ask HN: How to quickly animate system sketches and 2D diagrams?
by pbowyer on Hacker News.
I’m using Mermaid, Excalidraw and PlantUML diagrams to explain and document what I’m working on and they work great and are a lot better than screens of prose, but I’ve become aware that something is missing: motion. Animation brings a whole lot more to explanations, making simple explanations of how request coalescing works easy to understand, token simulations [0] through to helping explain concepts like Fresnel lenses [1]. Embedding them into GitHub READMEs, tweets and documentation would be awesome. Google do it to illustrate posts (e.g. https://ift.tt/z7TnAqi). I found Excalidraw Claymate [2] but the stop motion approach with no tweening support makes it painful to create animations where circles move from place to place. There’s also Manim [3] but I think this is more for maths. Adobe Flash used to be the go-to; what do you reach for when you want to illustrate a concept with an animated diagram? 0. https://ift.tt/Ios1Xf6 1. https://ift.tt/YGR5LNQ 2. https://ift.tt/4CbhMBk 3. https://ift.tt/VWfuKcn