3D hardware accelerated SVG using famo.us and Meteor

One of the main problem with SVG for Android or Chrome, desktop and mobile, is the lack of hardware acceleration. Multiple issues also prevents some nice effects like skewing for instance. Making smooth animated SVG in a browser or in Cordova tends to be tricky.

As stated in one of my former blog post, famo.us makes a good candidate for removing this pain and Meteor, with its famous-views package, makes a good candidate for tying up everything together.

This weekend, I've started working on a famous-views's plugin named fview-svg. Basically, it reads your SVG as template and create famo.us's Surface and StateModifier out of it. One of the sensitive parts of the process was the inverted coordinate system of SVG compare to DOM and SVG's responsive nature. But the beauty of making it a plugin with famous-views is that it will be available for anyone. Nice.

Here is a little video that demonstrates my first demo with fview-svg:

As you can check it in the source code, without the comments, this demo is less than 20 lines of codes. And there is room for improvements.

I've deployed a live demo and you can play with it: fview-svg.

I've tested on desktop in Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Opera. On iOS8, I've tested it, an iPad Mini, an iPad 2, an iPhone 5S. On Android, I've tested it on release 4.4.2 on a Samsung Galaxy Tab and on release 4.0.3 on an HTC Desire C. And this is this last test that just surprised me. You may not even know what this terminal is. It's a low end smarphone. Very cheap. A single core under 1GHz. What Android call a midpi. These terminals still equip a large portion of Android's market share. Just to give you a glimpse on these terminals, it doesn't even run the first Angry birds properly... And here, the SVG animation was perfect. Fluid. I almost shed a tear.

The source codes of the plugin as well as a tutorial for recreating this demo are available on Github:  fview-svg.

Note: The plugin is not already available on Atmosphere, the official Meteor repository. I wand to test it against several additional demos to check which API would be good to export for easing the integration. Still, you can start cloning it and import it in your project if you want to contribute or cannot wait few days.