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Famous — Design, publish, & track live web apps without coding
Famous is a design tool that enables designers to create, share, & publish stunning live mobile, tablet, and desktop experiences without coding. Share your designs live without needing to install anything on any device. Publish to any domain.
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I haven't used it myself yet but our UI Designer is quite mesmerized with the possibilities of the app 🙂. Even if we just use it to prepare animations that our developers can later implement – it seems well worth it. Haven't tested everything yet, so can't give more specific feedback but Famous is definitely something that can make our product team's lives easier.
@rysanna Thanks Anna, I can't wait to see what you do with Famous. It's been really exciting to finally launch after so many years of development. If you have any questions at all, just hit me up in our public Slack Channel that's built into Famous - just click the Slack icon in the lower left of the ribbon and you can reach me, any of our engineers, or any of our QA team.
I've been using Famous since early alpha and it's already on track to replace most of my day to day tools. The great thing about Famous is the ability to deliver my designs from Sketch to production in a matter of minutes. I design a lot of landingpages, prototypes, websites and digital reports and Famous is the tool I've been looking for for years.
The team behind Famous are great. They actively listen to their userbase and asks for feedback and opinions on new and upcoming features. It's very refreshing. The team is adding features almost every week and fixing bugs. A great product that's only getting better every week.
@froessell Thanks Frederik, that's just about the strong recommendation we could have gotten from a designer. To be a utility, an everyday tool is the highest standard and I'm very proud that you've selected Famous. In terms of new stuff, we're adding a feature voting platform inside of Famous and we've got some great additions coming soon including better defaults and an upgrade to the responsive engine that include common and custom breakpoints within devices.
I've been an Alpha user and so far it has really been amazing what we've been able to do with it. What's even more amazing is the jumps that the platform's capabilities make every time there's a new update. PROS: - It runs on Mac as well as Windows desktop - Previewing has been well thought out and works really well - Allows us to move from design to implementation rapidly, especially because iterations to designs instantaneously reflect in all the previews - The learning curve is not steep - The support for the industry standards (more import opportunities coming) - Their approach to components and working with other platforms (e.g. Stripe) is mind-blowingly impressive - Their responsiveness (not just the mobile responsive features), but the actually human beings as well. :) Most of my wishlist has been confirmed by the team to be on the way and most of the time I get an actual estimated release date. What's even better, it seems their mindset is to underpromise and then over-deliver. CONS: - Really looking forward to being able to integrate designs with APIs, dynamic content and coding - More import opportunities - More components and options to handle things like videos, etc. I recommend you jump in on the early subscriber option, you'll save a ton and I don't see what you would have to use.
Pros:This is a very mature, capable, fast-moving and feature-rich platform that is definitely a game-changer.
Cons:Adding support for APIs, Dynamic content and code will likely allow this platform to establish dominance.
I'm a designer that really doesn't want to learn to code. I really like the ability of what Famous is offering but I'm too unfamiliar with whether or not it is something I can actually use to produce "apps" - a lot of the focus is on the impressive transitions.
Is this a prototyping tool or a tool which will allow me to deploy actual finished web apps? Can I convert these web apps into native apps if need be?
Looking forward to any feedback - I'm sitting on the fence with this one and don't want to miss out on the discount launch price!
@ivanisawesome You echo my thoughts. But I also think this. Whatever I can do with Webflow now, I can do it (or soon enough) on Famous way more easily and sooner. So I am taking that discounted price. I am one of the alpha users and I can vouch too that the team is super responsive to features and bugs.
@ivanisawesome Hey Ivan great questions. In the beta, most people are using Famous as a prototyping tool or a tool to build static web experiences that they do publish. However, this is only the beta, and we will be releasing data bound components and the ability to code inside of Famous directly against our APIs. Our vision is that designers, engineers, and marketers can all work inside of one environment that produces product apps and web experiences.
Let me know if I answered you question in full. Happy to go in detail if you want - but it may be helpful to watch our YouTube videos - I show where we are going with God Mode, Coding, and many other things. You can see the videos here - https://www.youtube.com/channel/...
@ivanisawesome @kkirank Thanks Kiran, I can't wait to see what you do with Famous. I really appreciate you investing in Famous and we're doing everything we can to make sure the investment is worth it for you. I know it's a huge decision to adopt a new design tool and I really appreciate it.
I appreciate your feedback @stevenewcomb
One last question from me; I just saw via Facebook that the free beta has been extended to mid April. Will this apply to the pricing as well or will the price go up at the end of the month?
Thanks again.
@ivanisawesome out current launch plan is change the discount from 60% to 30% at the beginning of April 1-15, then we go to full price. However, once we hit April 15th, we will be offering the ability to choose monthly or yearly payments and we will also offer 10, 30 and 100 pack licenses with 10%, 20%, and 30% discounts respectively.
@john_mckinley Thanks John. Long time no see - I look a little different now, but I was a co-founder at Powerset with Barney and Lorenzo. Great to see you again, hit me up if you'd like to talk about Famous - steve@famous.co
@famous @stevenewcomb I remember the amazing job you did at Powerset! Have been tracking Famous since pre Alpha. It’s a step function improvement over the other rapid design tools out there.
If you are a designer that needs to publish quickly without relying on expensive developers, this is a must have! Even if you know code, there are a lot of cases where choosing Famous Studio will save you tons of time and be everything you need for publishing.
Pros:Seriously next level features for designing and publishing rich interactive web apps with amazing animations.
Cons:I’d love to see some APIs and ability for dynamic content in the future.
Thank you for developing this wonderful product. I do have a "stupid" question. If I use Famous, even though it's working, live web experience, it's still just a prototype, right? In other words, it still needs to be developed to be fully functional and so on, right? How do you explain to all the stakeholders about ROI on the custom animation and how do you get developers to buying into doing extra customization which will require more time on their part to achieve?
@tbs_lana Thanks for your question. OK, so here it goes - I'll do my best to answer your question in full. Right now while Famous is in beta, I'd say that most people are using us as a better prototyping tool and the feedback we're getting so far is that it's way better than the alternatives, especially because of the awesome animations, live preview, and live sharing without needing any software on phones.
So for now think of Famous as a perfect companion product for Sketch or AdobeXD where you import your designers, animate them, and the share and publish the result to anyone.
However, what we are working on adding in the full product is the following:
- Data-aware components
- UX components
- God Mode (Web + WebGL animations with 3D physics)
- Open API Access with Live Coding inside of Famous
In short, we are heavily inspired by Unity 3D, but the twist is we've made Famous really approachable for designers and with the APIs, really accessible for engineers. Our vision is that designers, engineers, and marketers can all participate collaboratively inside of Famous to dramatically reduce the time it takes to create things.
I recently did a video of creating a web experience that took a consultancy 3 months to create and I did it in 3 minutes - it's the video at the top of the page. My hope is that within 6 months we've added many of the bulleted features above.
Did this answer your question. I'm happy to keep going, but I thought I'd break here to ask if my answer helps.
Hello Product Hunters! 👋
Hey it's @stevenewcomb and @marklu from Famous and we are really excited to introduce you to Famous, a brand new design tool that enables you to import, design, animate, preview, and publish beautiful mobile, tablet, and desktop experiences without any coding at all.
Famous the first end to end comprehensive design tool that requires no coding and produces beautiful professional experiences that work on every device.
--- HERE'S WHAT WE HOPE YOU'll LOVE ABOUT US ---
Beauty
Beauty is most important cultural value. Our product, our culture, our code, and all of designs are centered around beauty. It is our most fundamental value and it drives everything we do. We hope that when you try Famous you can see that we worked tirelessly to make every animation, every interaction, and every feature in Famous beautiful.
Empathy
Our greatest strength is that we are a design lead company. Our CEO is a designer and has great empathy for the problems that designers face every day in their work flows. Our designers actively use nearly every design tool, prototyping tool, collaboration tool and also learn and use CGI tools and advanced music production tools to really understand art, design, and workflow from every possible angle.
Thought Leadership
While we listen to our community, we also see it as our responsibility to solve our communities greatest pain points with revolutionary thinking. For example, we understood that requiring a person to download a "viewer" app on a phone to see a preview was a major blocker to client relationships and team collaboration and we invented a live preview that enables designers not only show their creations to clients and team members without downloading any software, they could design live on any phone shared into the preview.
Approachability
We are designers and we love being part of the community. We really value being SUPER accessible. So, we've implemented Slack directly inside of Famous so you can interact directly with the design community, with our engineers, or our designers, and even our CEO any time you'd like.
Magic
One of the things you'll see in Famous is simply it's pure magic. For example our live preview let's you design live on your phone, your team's phones, your clients phones, and even at a live event to up to 250,000 phones without requiring anyone to install any preview software on their phones. It's just one of many magical moments packed inside our software.
🙏 We’d love to get some feedback and we're happy to answer questions!
- Steve & Mark
Will Famous collaborate with Figma in future? Can't wait <3 <3 <3
Pros:Easy tool to create stunning prototype with just a few click <3 <3 <3
Cons:Can Famous import files from Figma? - maybe next upgrade because I'm a Figma lover.
Famous Studio (Beta) is a promising gem that will literally influence and change not only the "game" but the digital industry mindset about digital designers relationship process between prototyping and pushing live as a web app, with a growing engineering ecosystem and engineers that got your back. That said, the perfect direct and transparent relationship with a company like Famous as a user is the key for the upcoming future. I've never experienced an Alpha and Beta testing like this in almost 10 years as a digital designer. It is an honor for being an early Alpha user with an inspiring team and Alpha mates. Surely worth a meaningful test with Famous team and its community is a really exceptional experience!
Pros:A meaningful vision and materialization of a progressive web app ecosystem.
Cons:For the short term I'de love to see scrollable areas feature, dynamic content integration, and widgets library.
Those animations look very slick! Reminds me a lot of the great UX of Keynote. I've got a few questions:
- Is the focus mostly on mobile apps that are indistinguishable from native apps or is there support to build full websites?
- Can a developer extend what's available or is this targeted towards non-technical makes only?
- Is it possible to layout items similar to how the DOM or is it all absolutely positioned like Sketch/Figma, etc?
- Are there any plans to make the editor work on the browser?
Looking forward to trying it out soon!
@ollermi thanks for the question - that's a great one for everyone to read about.
Question #1 - in a single .famous project you can design for mobile, tablet, desktop, and even TV all in one project.
Question #2 - the beta is for non-technical creators, but we are planning on opening up our APIs and letting engineers code against our APIs and also download the source.
Question #3 - Ha! Famous is actually a Website wrapped in Electron - so we could have it as a website. My question back to you is what's the advantage of doing that for you?
@stevenewcomb thanks for the quick reply!
Haha, that's awesome. Electron is great! To be honest, I don't mind using native apps when necessary so having it be in the browser isn't a necessity. I was just curious 😁
With tools like Figma working 100% in the browser I'm always curious of new products that can achieve very good UX without requiring a download.
@stevenewcomb
Hey Steve!
Is Famous ever going to become a PWA itself? What do you think of PWAs vs Electron? Wouldn't it be easier for you to maintain just one version? I understand updates are easier too. The advantage for me would be that I would be able to use it on my Chromebook! Right now I'm thinking what to do in order to be able to start using it. Chromebooks have become very popular :), specially among students. I'm with @ollermi about web apps.
I built an app using the Famous rendering engine back in '13. Very excited for the team and to see how far the product has come over the years. Congrats guys! Looking forward to using Famous again, this time on a blockchain dapp project.
@daniel_liebeskind thanks so much for the support and sticking with us all these years. It's been a dream to be able to finally launch our product. I can't wait to see what you do with it.
@yash_poojary Yash, thanks for your support. I'm here all day if you have any questions or comments. I'll do my best to answer everything full.
Famous is a great tool for any Designer who either can't code, or doesn't have the time to code their designs.
Pros:Offers something that other design tools don't.
Cons:More capability for fringe cases like supporting Internet Explorer, or less common device sizes.
Famous is a familiar design tool, but with an edge. It allows Designers to push straight to Production. In essence many Designers can become that "Unicorn" that the design industry always talks about.
There are some guidelines to follow with setting up your art boards, which help Famous publish out Progressive Web Apps, but other than that it works as advertised. There are no more surprises for the Designer once the project is rendered in code. Whatever he/she designed is what makes it to production. The great part about frameworks like Bootstrap was that it was able to get working code into Production quickly, however it did have some limitations, and caveats if you wanted to use it without heavy customizations. Now, with Famous, you can get the speed of using a framework, but the freedom of a custom design.
As an early adopter of the software, I can also attest to the speed in which the software is enhanced. The team at Famous have been crushing bugs, and adding new features on a weekly basis. As their brand-star suggests, they are also highly transparent and very accessible. To be honest, I'm not sure they sleep.
I recommend Famous for any Designer that doesn't know how, or have the time to code their own projects. Famous will get a bit pricey for individual designers once the product comes out of beta. I would recommend that you sign up for the early bird pricing, unless you have a large budget, or an agency to foot the bill.
@chally_meeker Thanks Chally, much appreciated. You've been a great alpha and beta member of our community and you've been great at helping us identify and track down the bugs. We'll be at it every day making sure we provide you with a trustworthy product.
@chally_meeker Thanks so much for the kind words! You're exactly right, we don't sleep much, but feedback like this makes it all worth it. We appreciate you 😊
I've been using Famous since early Alpha. The product itself is a game-changer for visual storytellers. The product rollout and alpha testing has been exemplary, with a design, QA and support team that is passionate and brilliant.
@micahboswell Thanks Micah. It's been a pleasure having you as one of our very first users. Whenever I'm tired and I haven't slept and I'm feeling totally burnt out, I just pull up your Instant Story you did and I get all the energy I need. You rock and keep up the really creative work with Famous.
@micahboswell thank you for the kind words! Your early alpha Lookback videos consistently brought joy to the office and there were definitely days that we needed it. We appreciate you 😊
@stevenewcomb You're a true craftsman - I'm honored that I've had a chance to help you and your team out. You have a grand vision, and that vision is desperately needed by the design community. You fight the good fight - happy to help in any way I can.
@dbradleyfl Absolutely, good sir. I'm a huge believer in the work you and your team have done. Drinks on me the next time I'm in SF - would enjoy taking you and steve out for a pint or two!
Love the concept and the approach.
A few questions come to mind to Steve and the team,
Have you thought about SEO? From what I saw it looks like any text would be converted to a type of SVG format which is not clickable, wondering if there are any thoughts there?
Can companies host their website on their own servers or it's still on your server?
@maher_sinjary Hey Maher, in terms of SEO yes. You may not know it, but I also co-founded Powerset which was acquired by Microsoft and it's now called Bing. So SEO is SUPER important to me and in fact yes, we built Famous from scratch to be SEO'able. In terms of text being converted to SVG, you may have seen an old version of Famous. The new one converts all text to DOM and is SEO'able. It was super hard, but we finally nailed it!
In terms of "Can companies host their own servers, or is it all on our servers?" Here's the breakdown
1) Famous Pro - our servers with your vanity URL
2) Famous Pro Gold - your domain with your vanity URL
3) Famous Enterprise (not released yet) - on premises option
Amazing tool. As a graphic designer, to have one tool that Is able to accomplish all these tasks is a dream-come-true. 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
@mayra_mendonca Thanks Mayra. It's so awesome to have such great people to be a part of the journey of Famous. It's been a long 8 years since we started this crazy thing and I'm just overwhelmed at the outpouring of support we are getting.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Fodeli