Webflow makes GSAP 100% free – plus more updates(webflow.com)
136 pointsby mefengl9 months ago15 comments
  • wewewedxfgdf9 months ago
    Other fun animation sites:

    https://svgartista.net

    https://animejs.com

    https://animate.style

    https://animista.net

    LLMs are pretty good at this stuff too - just ask the LLM to use one of these resources when making your thing.

    • spiderfarmer9 months ago
      AnimeJS is so darn impressive. The site and documentation is chefs kiss.
    • simpaticoder9 months ago
      Interesting. "Animation" seems to cover a lot of ground, like "programming". They seem to fit into "artistic" animation, designed to be looked at, and interactive animation, and in this list mainly for UI component interaction and feedback. But in addition, animation is used for data visualization (e.g. D3 or charts.js) and game programming. Did I miss a category? Are these the right names?
  • SloopJon9 months ago
    The obvious question is, what does free mean? Here's the license:

    https://gsap.com/community/standard-license/

    Basically freeware with express prohibitions on competing with Webflow.

    • akudha9 months ago
      Isn't that fair? What am I missing?
      • stuartjohnson129 months ago
        It's a land grab that, if GSAP becomes a standard, makes it that much harder to compete with Webflow.

        For example GSAP will now never make its way into Figma or Framer which is a staple of the design workflows of many teams. This move by Webflow makes GSAP a line of demarkation between Figma-based workflows, Framer-based workflows, and Webflow-based workflows.

        Any momentum the library might have had is now skewered by these limitations which will surely create demand for more different animation libraries to exist within other walled gardens.

        The same happened to Vercel & Next.js which now seems to be powering the return of Vite & CSR.

        Now that said, I'd never heard of this library until this announcement, and I don't know much about its role in the javascript ecosystem, but I can't say that the trend towards M&A kingdoms in the open source community delights me.

        • johncoltrane9 months ago
          FWIW, sub-5kb banners were probably the only Flash projects that didn't include GSAP before we collectively jumped ships to JavaScript and CSS for animation on the web. It was everywhere.
        • gman839 months ago
          Figma and Framer both seem to be backing https://motion.dev/ which is open-source.
          • esperent9 months ago
            Wasn't motion.dev originally framer.motion? So not much of a surprise they are backing their own library.
        • robertoandred9 months ago
          GSAP is already a standard and Next has always done CSR.
        • anon70009 months ago
          I mean, don’t framer and figma also have loads and loads of features which you can’t import into other tools?
  • xnx9 months ago
    Always cool to see more free stuff, but about the only animations I want to see on the web are from https://ciechanow.ski/
    • dleeftink9 months ago
      It's not just for Web though, but a really nice approach to authoring motion graphics in general. Motioncanvas is also worth a mention in this space[0].

      [0]: https://motioncanvas.io/

    • spiderfarmer9 months ago
      To be fair, https://animejs.com gave me the same vibe. In the sense that the author obsesses over details, while also being very educational.
  • low_tech_punk9 months ago
    I hope this is a reaction to Framer's rapid development in Frame Motion (https://motion.dev/). Webflow and Framer are competing as site builders, so giving the animation library to everyone is like Meta giving out React.
    • ayhanfuat9 months ago
      I’d say it is too little too late. Motion already has the lion’s share and anime.js is another strong open source alternative. GSAP was quite big in its day but why would anyone invest in it today? Also Motion is no longer part of Framer.
      • _neil9 months ago
        The community for GSAP is still amazing and there’s years of forum posts for most questions you might have. Motion and anime are great but I’m skeptical that either have a lion share relative to GSAP.
  • icemelt89 months ago
    Who here is old enough to know that Greensock was actually a flash library?
    • kabes9 months ago
      Thanks for reminding me I'm getting old
  • exiguus9 months ago
    Beside it's not MIT, so no one will use it. Who is using it? Last time i looked it up, it was like jQuery for animtion. What do i miss about it? Why should i use it?
  • Zekio9 months ago
    not often you see an acquisition result in something good for existing users, and this is a surprisingly good outcome
  • tanepiper9 months ago
    Nice development for the library, I've been using it in https://teskooano.space for ThreeJS camera transition - I'll have to check out this new stuff too
  • pier259 months ago
    Amazing how far TweeLite has come. It was probably my most used dependency in Flash projects back in the day.

    Jack, if you're reading, I'm sorry I made fun of the green sock brand back in the Kirupa days!

    (GS in GSAP stands for Green Sock)

  • irq-19 months ago
    Check out Lottie for animated SVG: https://lottie.github.io/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottie_(file_format)

    • satvikpendem9 months ago
      Rive is better in my experience, much more performant and a nice editor to go along with it.
    • kotg9 months ago
      Lottie handles a different usecase. Lottie is used to port animations from after effects to the web as an svg animation. For this Lottie will use a static json file which is generated beforehand. It uses a quite complex structure and is mere impossible to read as a human. Making dynamic manipulations not feasible.

      For dynamic animations gasp is great as you just code the animation in js making it a perfect fit for the web. The creation process can be quite cumbersome though.

  • nikisweeting9 months ago
    We loved GSAP and wanted to combine that style of rendering with an event-driven programming model with redux so that we could pass animation events from a backend over a websocket.

    Also wanted to keep a bunch of animations on different computers around the world in sync to within ~30ms. Ended up building this library: https://monadical-sas.github.io/redux-time/

  • kbaker9 months ago
    GSAP – A wildly robust JavaScript animation library built for professionals [https://gsap.com]
    • XCSme9 months ago
      I keep hearing about it, but I've never used it. Why would I use it over https://animejs.com ?
      • ZachSaucier9 months ago
        GSAP is a bit more robust than anime.js. Over the years anime has been adding more functionality and changing its syntax to be more like GSAP's. They're both solid libraries though
      • Eric_WVGG9 months ago
        I only discovered GSAP the other week, very quickly solved a complex animation problem and walked away quite impressed.

        Now I'm looking at AnimeJS and my mind is properly blown, looks even better.

        • saelthavron9 months ago
          Serious question, is this a joke? I just see a black screen when I go to the site. I refreshed multiple times. Cleared cache. Just a black screen.
          • moritzruth9 months ago
            You have probably disabled WebGL in your browser.
  • rorylaitila9 months ago
    I've had good success with GSAP in a game I've been working on. For whatever reason I found it's tween and timeline a little complicated to reason about when chaining animations. But it otherwise is fast and rock solid. You can also use it to interpolate and time anything, not just animations.
  • rtcode_io9 months ago
    Yeah, no! GSAP is not open-source → they can pull the rag on you anytime. No need for drama when we can find/generate alternatives.
    • peteforde9 months ago
      You're free to use/do as you wish, but GSAP is a remarkably powerful library that benefits from two decades of very smart people optimizing it.

      It's very typical for someone to look at something that is only 95% perfect and declare that they could replace it in a few days or weeks, while simply refusing to learn from history (or Joel Spolsky's warnings against the big rewrite).

      • azemetre9 months ago
        No. As an industry we need to start consolidating on open source tooling, we see what happens when a company breaks away from open source licenses: it hurts consumers at their detriment.

        Your quote has no bearing in this context. We aren't talking about rewriting our projects, we're talking about purposely choosing open and free tools.

        Also GSAP isn't even the leading animation library in JS ecosystem, thankfully.

        • peteforde9 months ago
          I was thinking about this further, and I wanted to say that you're confusing what you want with what "we" "need" to do.

          I'm not trying to be argumentative so much as point out that different people/companies have different goals, motivations and values. There are many stops between avoidance and zealotry.

          For the people/companies who were happy to pay for Greensock and happier to use it for free-as-in-beer, clearly there is something there which speaks to them regardless of how it is licensed. It's important to remember that freedom means people can absolutely choose a paid product, and that's no moral or ethical lapse but often an educated decision.

          • azemetre9 months ago
            Web flow will sue you if you use green sock as a competitor. In what world of truly open source software is that something we should allow as a society? Let alone want.

            I don’t want software to get corrupted by financialization. This is why so many people are passionate about open source, it also leads us to the next phase of this battle where software patents are made obsolete because it’s all mathematics and you shouldn’t be able to patent mathematical systems.

        • peteforde9 months ago
          I was responding to someone who said that we could "generate" alternatives, so there's still time for you to remove the unnecessarily spiteful downvote.
  • EGreg9 months ago
    Strange announcement

    Wasn’t GSAP already free and open source? I remember seeing it years ago!

    Is this more capitalism doublespeak?

    • peteforde9 months ago
      GSAP has long had a free base library with many advanced features only available on a paid subscription basis.

      While free as in beer is welcome, in a past life I was happy to pay to be able to access such a powerful toolkit.