The thing I dislike about most prototyping tools -- and Origami is no exception -- is how so much emphasis is placed on polishing micro-interactions before the app flow is even in place. It's like trying to produce a movie by doing color correction before you even have a screenplay.<p>The mobile previews from Origami-like tools will show a refined "golden path" through the app with beautiful stock photos in every screen, but more boring use cases tend to be ignored. This tends to lead to usability problems down the road, when users discover those "dead ends" that the design unconsciously avoided.<p>It's also frustrating for programmers when you are handed a high-gloss prototype that has no relation to the actual platform UI classes and guidelines. Implementing all those fancy little triggered animations takes so much time that no one has time to peek at the iOS guidelines and notice how the design actually breaks 80% of Apple's rules.<p>Companies like Facebook have enough resources and actual UX competence to get these things right (eventually), but I've seen this happen too many times at smaller agencies and startups.
This piece of software is amazing. Great job on this, Facebook! And thanks a lot for open sourcing it. I'd easily have paid a lot of money for this. I was actually looking into Flinto before seeing this. Thanks!
I'm really curious how this was built. Quartz Composer got a lot of things right, but it's showing it's age. Was this rebuilt from the ground up?
This has popped up as a recommendation for me several times. Each time I spent like 2 minutes looking for non-app examples. Is Origami phone app only, or can you prototype browser/desktop experiences as well?
i really wonder why facebook did not build something cross platform .. maybe using something like Electron to build something like Figma.com<p>It would have been brilliant for Linux desktop users.
Origami looks interesting but, I just deleted my Facebook account. I got into a tat with some Facebook Product Designers in a FB Design Group, went to bed, woke up, and discovered I was kicked from the group (couldn't even see the page any longer). I would rather not associate myself with products where the attitude is: Listen to what we say - otherwise, we will drag your name through the coals and ban you.
I really wish there was a prototyping tool that could serve as a learning tool to jump from being a designer to a programmer.<p>The problem with tools like Origami (and Framer.js) is that you need to know coding and many designers just don't know it. Thus, they stick with easier solutions like Principle. It would be great if a tool could start off looking like Sketch and slowly become Xcode as I learn more features and become more experienced.
This looks like a very powerful tool just by browsing through the examples for few minutes on the site. Minor issue with the documentation, however, is that there seems to be issues with pages of the site rendering incorrectly on both Safari and Chrome on the iPhone.<p><a href="http://imgur.com/PRDR2j1" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/PRDR2j1</a>
Brilliant! Flow programming applied to ui state & design.<p>Edit: And by "Flow programming" I mean something like : <a href="http://noflojs.org/" rel="nofollow">http://noflojs.org/</a>
The critical issue with prototyping apps is that you're designing for a mythical mobile platform only semi-related to the main two. As such, you end up mastering code, tricks, and techniques for a fake platform when you could've been learning practical fundamentals of UI design directly in Xcode or Android Studio... or both!