A module for adding 2D physics simulations to your Framer prototypes.
My first article on prototyping in Framer looked at how to write a custom layer class and save it as a module. This follow-up takes things to the next level with an experiment in physics.
What would it take to build a simple physics simulation in Framer?
I recently set myself a challenge to build a physics engine module for Framer. Something I could use to test out a game idea. To a non-developer like myself, that might seem ambitious. But when you take anything on in Framer most times you’ll find you can build on other people’s efforts. Plus…
Most days my laptop wakes up not long after I do, to connect me to the global computer network. At night, as I lie in bed, I see it doze off and begin to snore. We live and work together, cross the city together. We’re joined at the hip. I’m half Mac, I guess. Donna Haraway would call me a cyborg, a cybernetic organism, part human part machine. She says human subjectivity is increasingly dependent on machines, that we’re all cyborgs. Do machines have a subjectivity too? How is it formed, and how does all of this affect culture?
In his 1950 paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Alan Turing proposed the idea of an “imitation game” to provide the answer to the question “Can machines think?”. The game is played with three people: a man, a woman, and an Interrogator who may be of either sex. The object of the game is for the Interrogator to determine who is the man and who is the woman. So that the sex of the other players is not given away by the sound of their voices, they communicate using text only. The rules require that the man must always lie about…
In the last year or so, there’s been a massive explosion of prototyping tools for UX designers. Of these, Framer is arguably the most powerful and versatile. But Framer prototypes are created in code and, for a designer, getting started can feel intimidating.
I recently set myself the challenge of tackling Framer. A few weeks in, and I’ve written my first module, created a custom layer class and learnt how to manipulate SVGs. I want to walk you through the module code, and share some of the things I’ve figured out along the way.
