14 comments

  • Zack Brown, over 4 years ago

    Hey DN! It's been a while. We've been hard at work on our mission to unite design & code here at Haiku.

    Haiku is the only UI design tool where your designs ARE production code components. No more code generation and no more hand-offs — just a single source of truth, accessible to both designers and developers. With Haiku, designing is building.

    We just launched a huge update. Here's what's new:

    • Adobe Illustrator support: Now you can sync your designs from Sketch, Figma, AND Illustrator. Haiku versions your design files right alongside your code using git.
    • Reusable components: Haiku projects have always been components (ready for React/Angular/Vue,) but now you can finally compose multiple reusable components inside single projects. Combined with States, Expressions, Actions, and live data, you can create extremely powerful production UIs entirely inside Haiku.
    • Shape morphing & direct selection: Now you can morph vector paths inside Haiku & animate transitions.
    • Code Editor: You've always been able to edit the code behind any Haiku project with your own editor, but we finally brought a code editor front-and-center into the app
    • Drawing improvements: Including auto-snapping, align/distribute, element locking, grouping/ungrouping, and pinch-zoom
    • Animation improvements: Marquee selection on the timeline, pinch-zooming on the timeline, perf improvements

    Finally:

    • We just launched Haiku Pro: $19/mo or $199/yr, full offline access, unlimited private project storage, high quality GIF & video export, offline Lottie export, and more.
    • HAIKU FREE IS HERE TO STAY.
    • Check out our new website!https://www.haiku.ai
    13 points
    • Artur Eldib, over 4 years ago

      This is awesome, Zach! The first version that I used was a but sluggish,m and I havent tested the app back. Did you fix it?

      0 points
      • Zack Brown, over 4 years ago

        Hey Artur, yes we've made tons of headway on performance. We launched our beta brutally early so we could gather feedback. We continue to make the app faster, and it's significantly faster than our first public version in Feb 2018.

        2 points
  • Mattan IngramMattan Ingram, over 4 years ago

    Interesting, looks like Haiku is becoming more of an overall component builder than just an animation GUI.

    It's beginning to get difficult to keep track of all the ways to visually build modern JS components!

    3 points
    • Zack Brown, over 4 years ago

      Hey Mattan — and we're only on step two! Our ultimate aim is to enable design + build collaboration on any app for any platform.

      • First we shipped a tool for "animations that ship to production," noting a huge gap left in the market since Flash died

      • Next step [Today] was "Component builder for any [web] UI." Now we have a collaborative bridge between YOUR design tool and YOUR codebase.

      • Final step is "Full application design+builder for any platform." Integrating with your existing workflow is critical here.

      It's beginning to get difficult to keep track of all the ways to visually build modern JS components!

      I agree, this is part of what's so exciting about this space! So many people recognize the problem here, so a ton of bright minds are exploring solutions.

      Our take: Haiku is the only component builder with unlimited animation/positioning/sizing/shape/color expressiveness. UIs don't fit into the "Qt" or "Visual Basic" mold anymore. (Btw grids & layouts coming soon to Haiku! They're just components, after all.)

      If you can render any pixel to be any value at any time — you can build any UI.

      3 points
      • Mattan IngramMattan Ingram, over 4 years ago

        If you can render any pixel to be any value at any time — you can build any UI.

        True, although when built on web technologies you have to take performance into account since I assume you don't use canvas to draw the components.

        It's still amazing to me that we can have photorealistic video games running at 60fps but still struggle to move rectangles on a webpage at times.

        0 points
        • Zack Brown, over 4 years ago

          when built on web technologies you have to take performance into account

          Tell me about it! Yes, pushing the boundaries of web rendering perf is part of our challenge, at least for Haiku on the web.

          Good news is, Haiku isn't bound to web tech. Haiku exporting to Lottie is proof of our ability to render Haiku content natively to iOS and Android. The only thing Lottie's missing for 100% Haiku support is support for interactions and executing user-land code. We're working on it.

          ...move rectangles on a webpage...

          Think of it this way: Haiku "moves rectangles," but is ultimately agnostic of whether they're on web pages or in iPhone apps. At the end of the day, it's the same kind of abstraction as React Native — a Rectangle is a Rectangle. This is where we're going with "Full application design+builder for any platform"

          1 point
  • Billy MitchellBilly Mitchell, over 4 years ago

    I love using Haiku! It's pretty easy to create a preferment animation in code and get it running on your website. Very happy to see the project continue to grow.

    1 point
  • joe andersonjoe anderson, over 4 years ago

    Hey Zack congrats on this, combining design and code is becoming more and more of a reality thanks to the hard work from folks like you! I was curious if you guys had a chance to user test this homepage with designers? It looks incredibly handy but I feel the part around universal components and how you can literally choose react, vue, or angular could be highlighted even more. It looks like guys have something potentially as powerful if not more powerful than framer X but it's hard to tell based on the messaging/marketing. Hope this helps!

    1 point
    • Zack Brown, over 4 years ago

      Thanks for the excellent feedback, Joe. We're always iterating and will continue to talk to our users and evolve the web copy for sure. I've taken note of your thoughts here.

      0 points
      • Guru Mahendran, over 4 years ago

        I hope this question isn't in poor taste, but how does Haiku compare to Framer X? Is it meant to solve the same problem for the same people?

        From the homepage I thought, like Joe, that this was solving the same problem as Framer X but positioned towards developers rather than designers.

        (I don't mean this in a bad way at all!)

        0 points
  • Thiago Duarte, over 4 years ago

    Congrats on the launch, Zack!

    0 points