August 13, 2026
Zero animations, maximum drama
Show HN: Inertia – Not your Grandfathers animation editor
Cool new animation app meets brutally honest internet vibes
TLDR: Inertia lets people animate the real app interface instead of mocking it up somewhere else, which could save a lot of time. But commenters fixated on the sales pitch, roasting the slick landing page and mocking the fact that an animation tool showed off with no visible animation.
A new Show HN project called Inertia is pitching a pretty slick idea: instead of making animations in a separate design program and awkwardly copying them into your app later, you animate the real thing while the app is actually running. In plain English, that means a developer or designer can grab buttons, cards, and other on-screen pieces, drag them around on a timeline, and save the motion in one file that works across Apple, Android, and web projects. On paper? Very cool. In the comments? Instant side-eye.
The biggest drama wasn’t even about the product’s code — it was about the vibes. One commenter basically declared war on glossy startup-style websites, saying they struggle to get past landing pages that feel like "slop" and even wished creators would clearly say whether they built the thing themselves. Ouch. Another comment landed an even cleaner punch: an animation tool with no animation on the landing page. That roast practically writes itself, and yes, it became the joke of the thread.
So the mood was a classic internet split-screen: the project itself sounds genuinely useful, especially for teams tired of rebuilding tiny motion tweaks over and over, but the community reaction was all about presentation, trust, and irony. In other words, Inertia tried to sell motion magic, and the crowd immediately asked: "Then why is the homepage standing still?"
Key Points
- •Inertia is described as a keyframe editor that animates real app UI components instead of exported assets or separate design files.
- •The tool supports three runtimes—SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose, and React—with a shared workflow and one animation file format.
- •Live editing works by connecting a running app to the editor over a local WebSocket and syncing edits to tagged views on a shared timeline.
- •Integration is described as tagging views with ids, editing them in the running build, and committing an animation.inertia file into the repository.
- •The article highlights additional features including alignment guides and vertex-based shape authoring, with platform-specific rendering via Metal, OpenGL ES 2.0, and WebGL.