The closed nature of their 'open source' project can be frustrating at times. Having said that and despite all the hype, famo.us is sitting in a pretty unique position in the html mobile web scene and frankly I'm more excited about it than any of the alternatives (sencha, jquery mobile, etc).
> Famo.us is built around a neat idea: by directly using the CSS matrix3d transform in combination with the window.requestAnimationFrame function, you can describe the complete layout and animation of your app in a way that’s hardware accelerated with consistent performance.
> It’s a stroke of genius, but in order to implement that simple idea you need a sophisticated math library to help translate your app’s UI into the series of matrix transformations that get pushed to the GPU. This library is Famo.us.
It's a stroke of genius, yes, that others have had before now. Lime.js did this three years ago (mapping animations to hardware-accelerated CSS). Cocos2Dx-Javascript does this one step better by bridging into actually-native rendering code. Three.js has DOM-with-CSS-transformations. IIRC someone implemented hardware-accelerated CoreAnimation in Cappuccino using CSS transformations. So, not really new. I'm curious to see what new ideas they DO bring.
The closed nature of their 'open source' project can be frustrating at times. Having said that and despite all the hype, famo.us is sitting in a pretty unique position in the html mobile web scene and frankly I'm more excited about it than any of the alternatives (sencha, jquery mobile, etc).
It's early days, I wouldn't write it off yet...