Dariel Noel Vila Plagado, a 27 year old front-end Engineer with 7 years of domain experience loves “the design, the beauty of animations, JavaScript” and works on open source projects in his free time. Dariel is the founder of AniCollection – the easiest way to find, use and share CSS3 animations (http://anicollection.github.io/). He has also created two other interesting projects – AniJS – a Library to raise your Web Design without coding (http://anijs.github.io/) and AniJS Studio – a chrome extension that allows you to add and test css3 animations to any web without coding (http://anijs.github.io/studio/).
What is AniCollection?
AniCollection is a free tool for finding, using and sharing CSS3 animations. Key goal is to provide to Designers, programmers and creative people in general, a highly productive environment that enables them to create stuffs without having to worry about technical details. AniCollection is not an isolated project. It is the center of an ecosystem that revolves around the CSS3 animations. This ecosystem is also composed of AniJS and AniJS Studio. Using AniCollection, one can find lots of apps and customize them, but to integrate these animations to a website, AniJS and AniJS Studio play special roles.
“The power of animations is undervalued” laments Dariel. He adds, “People build websites like flat newspapers. There’s no magic in a flat newspaper”. While working on a project for one of his clients, Dariel realized the “missing pieces in the puzzle of adding animations to the websites”. “Something had to change” Dariel thought. The key objective was to do away with writing tons of code to add a simple animation. There hadn’t been a quick, clean and efficient way to add CSS3 animations to a web page without writing code. The ecosystem of AniCollection, AniJS and AniJS studio provides “a clean and simple solution that lets you find, customize and add animations to your pages even graphically.” Another interesting advantage is that the animations can be added superficially to any website in the world, including Google, Facebook, etc. This is a possibility for designers and programmers to have a giant laboratory for testing new concepts.
The Challenge and the competitors
The biggest challenge for these projects has been to raise funds to keep going. The projects depend entirely on donations from people. As any other open source projects, people make use of the projects, but are “unaware of the cost of maintenance”. “Our competitors are big guys like Adobe and Google” says Dariel. While these companies have great code, they generate a large amount of garbage code and moreover, you cannot interact with the existing pages if you do not have source code.