During our chat, Famo.us showed me examples of their framework being used in a way I’d never seen it used for before: super complex 2D web apps running at buttery speeds. Before today, nearly everything I’d seen come out of Famo.us were crazy, theoretical, 3D interfaces — like the oh-so-Minority-Report periodic table demo that sits on their homepage.
weather layers Remember Yahoo’s super-gorgeous new Weather app? For one of their internal demos, Famo.us built a pixel-for-pixel replica of that app… in HTML5. They’d managed to mimic everything from the popout menus, to the parallax scrolling, to the beautiful background blurring effects, and it all ran so smoothly that I never would’ve guessed it wasn’t running natively on the device. Unfortunately, they denied my (dozen or so) requests to get it on video, worried that Yahoo’s legal team might bring down the hammer. I hope they eventually get to release it, if only so I can properly tear apart the source. The lil’ mockup over to the right was the most I could get out of them.