they've also done ios7 main menu on word.

Link posted in the description. Take a look!

Awesome! I really dig the glow effect. Did you create all the assets in Keynote or did you import them? I also like the subtle animations of the gears and piston.

Hey great link! I echo all those bullet points on using Keynote at a prototyping tool.

What do you mean with "better"?

A prototype is a prototype, right?

If AE is your jam, then no. I like the way Pasquale D’Silva put it in his article, 'The State of Interaction Design Tools.'

"After Effects is an extremely powerful package, but is fundamentally built for video, motion graphics & compositing work. This creates The Photoshop Kitchen Sink Effect™ where the new user is punched in the eyeballs with an interface full of mostly irrelevant horseshit, that is not useful for anything. Once the user learns they only need 20% of the tools, they stop crying themselves to sleep at night like a little bitch. (That was how I learned After Effects)"

https://medium.com/p/f755c6515368

I think Keynote puts a lot of power in designer's hands with minimal effort. There's a beauty in not needing a timeline and keyframes, which can be difficult to manage. In my opinion with AE or any other animation software, you get sucked into the void of animating more and designing less. Where should we be spending our time?

You got it! What a great way to bring rich illustrations to life!

My experience matches yours! For most of my work, building a quick animation in Keynote with the assets I already have is all I need. A robust animation or prototyping tool are overkill for quick storytelling or testing ideas.

That's not to say I don't think those other tools don't have a place, I just think they should come later in the process.

Question: Why do have to run the quicktime through GIF rocket and then place images into Flinto? Are you trying to recreate the animations in Flinto?

And YES to Keynote files at a 90˚ angle.

One thing I've noticed, many people (not necessarily you) make the mistake of building ALL the animations with ALL the assets into a single slide or two. It's easier to separate the flow out into multiple slides, like a storyboard, with Magic Move doing most of the heavy lifting with transitional animations. Secondary animations can then be added as builds.

However, I have encountered slides with many builds, with some occurring at the same time, and some with delays, and some with different easing, and it can be difficult to track. Some would say a timeline would be helpful here, but I'm afraid adding one would be a slippery slope. There's something simple and elegant about having fewer options, enough to communicate the point, and then moving on.

That said, I do wish there were a few more easing presets, and they were available to all animations.

I've tried Animate during its beta phase. I switched to Hype at the time because it supported multiple art boards or "scenes," and hyperlinking between them. In the end, both were slow to me. Also, neither have Magic Move, which does most of the heavy lifting.

I'm beginning to learn that the timeline, the backbone of animation tools, are actually a greater hinderance to designers than not...at least during the early phases of a project.

Are you sure about Mica? My understanding is that Mica was based on the Shake engine within FCP, but was discontinued.

Are you sure about Mica? My understanding is that Mica was based on the Shake/Motion engine within FCP, but was discontinued. Here are some details from Nov 2013: http://alex4d.com/notes/item/imovie-2013-and-fcpx-10-1-part-3

I have used other tools, but in the end, I keep coming back to Keynote. It's just so fast and intuitive. Here, I was primarily using it to show its capabilities as an animation and storytelling tool. QC and Framer are different because they're meant to produce non-linear interactive prototypes with rich gestures and finer levels of animations. You'll spend a lot more time in those apps, but to a different end. Keynote can be used as a prototyping tool, but it's not very good at it. If you're designing for mobile, I suggest Flinto. It's super simple, and it works on iOS and Android.

Today I learned that Framer.js has Sketch integration, so I am very interested in trying that to build something non-linear with rich gestures quickly.