Facebook’s Origami Live is a way of prototyping smartphone apps—without writing a single line of computer code. Credit: Facebook
Facebook is releasing a new iPhone app through the Apple App Store, but it’s not for everyone. It’s for the world’s software designers.
This morning, the social networking giant unloaded an app-ified version of Origami, the primary design tool the company used in creating Facebook Paper—the rather impressive news reader it released last year—as well as various other Facebook apps, including Instagram, Messenger, Slingshot, Hyperlapse, and Rooms.
Basically, Origami provides a way for designers to rapidly prototype new mobile apps—without writing a single line of computer code. Based on an old Apple graphics tool called Quartz composer, it lets you piece together hundreds of tiny graphical widgets and animations into something that looks—and behaves—a lot like a real smartphone app. In just a few hours, for instance, Facebook designer Mike Matas used the tool to create a working prototype of Paper’s distinctive “tilt-to-explore” photo viewer.
Others tools offers ways for non-coders to prototype apps, including Balsamiq and Proto.io. But Facebook’s new app, Origami Live for iOS, aims to take this sort of thing to a new level, letting designers like Matas—who doesn’t actually write computer code—build a more complex breed of prototype.
“With Paper, it helped us build things that otherwise would not have been built,” says Brandon Walkin, who created the tool inside Facebook. “It gives designers a way of doing things that are more traditionally in the domain of engineers.”
Facebook previously open sourced a version of Origami, sharing its underlying software code with the world at large. But Origami Live is something different. It’s pre-packaged into a mobile app that designers—as opposed to open-source-savvy developers—can readily use straight from their iPhones and iPads. Previously, designers outside of Facebook could only use the prototyping tool on their desktops or laptops.
With Origami Live, you can view and demonstrate prototypes on your iPhone or iPad, as if they were full-fledged apps. But the tool still dovetails with desktop machines. You can’t use it without plugging your iPhone or iPad into a laptop or desktop (it needs additional processing power). It lets you edit your prototypes from these beefier machines. And as you demo a prototype on your phone, you can mirror its behavior on these machines as well. “You can control your prototype on your phone,” says Walkin, “while presenting it on another screen at the same time.”
According to Walkin, Origami Live also includes a way of automatically converting basic prototypes into raw computer code. With the click of a button, he says, you can transform a prototype into code that can run on iPhones or Android devices or inside web browsers. This code will likely be rather rough, but it gives engineers a starting point as they seek to turn prototypes into complete smartphone apps.
Robert Armstrong, who runs a San Francisco-based mobile development house called Appstem, is at least intrigued by the idea of Origami Live—and believes his firm could make good use of it. “It might make it easier,” he says, “to get prototypes in front of our clients.”
Does it make sense that Facebook would release—and maintain—such an app? Perhaps. The company is intent on sharing so many of its technologies with the world at large, both through open source code and other means. It has even released designs for the computer servers and networking switches it has fashioned for use inside the massive data centers that underpin its online operation. Driven by CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook believes that in sharing its tech expertise, it will expand the internet as a whole—which can only help the further expansion of Facebook itself.
In this case, the company is looking to expand the mobile internet—just as it’s doing with a cloud computing service called Parse. But that’s for engineers. Origami is for designers.
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