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First of all, when they come and offer you a pile of money (and they will), please insist on a clause that they release it. Someone may try to bury it. Anyway,

First of all, when they come and offer you a pile of money (and they will), please insist on a clause that they release it. Someone may try to bury it. Anyway, I had fun playing with it. The timeline gives me happy/terrifying Director/Flash flashbacks. I can't figure out how to make an animation cycle in the timeline (i.e. like a walk animation) without cheating & creating keyframes by moving stuff to a slightly different (x,y). I also couldn't figure out how to script top-level elements (does everything need to be composited inside a cavas?). I added a number of "picture layer" objects that I wanted to move via keyboard control. I couldn't figure out how to put a script in the topmost layer to do this (nor could I see how to reference the sub-layers so that I could move them). I might have been fooling myself -- it looks so much like Flash or Director, that I expected to be able to write a top-level script that controls all of the sub-elements. If that's not possible due to the overall layer architecture, you should make that clear (by making the other scripting opportunities explicit when available). A few quick suggestions: - The "command line" input in the script editor is a great idea, like the "message window" of HyperCard or FaceSpan. I think you'd do well to make it its own window, and have the last result displayed underneath the input area (ala FaceSpan) so I don't have to wrap everything in sys.trace. - Positioning elements via arrow keystrokes doesn't seem to work -- please implement bindings similar to Interface Builder (or FaceSpan) where modifier do useful things like snap to grid and stretch. - JavaScript API reference menu item doesn't seem to work. I found it eventually (http://lacquer.fi/developer/conduit-js/#sys http://lacquer.fi/developer/conduit-js/#sys in case anyone else has the same problem). Overall, it looks great. I can't wait to hard to believe you kept it quiet long enough to do all of this. Congratulations!

pavlov 16y ago
Thanks so much for the insightful comments! I know what you mean by the happy/terrifying timeline :) I thought hard whether it would be misleading to make the timeline look so similar, especially when it doesn't have the same functionality at this point, and the quirkiness of Flash keyframing has been such a source of frustration to users. But I decided that the big elements need to have a certain familiarity in order to make the app's purpose more obvious at a glance. (I guess it would be the same if I was making a photo editor: there are some UI conventions that are clearly outdated but people expect them from years of Photoshopping.) There is a document-level scripting environment, but it's not exposed to layers yet -- the JavaScript hooks to the compositing system don't exist yet, and the UI to tie it together with the timeline has not been designed. The way Flash implemented this is clearly pretty nasty, so I'd like to come up with something a bit cleaner, hopefully. Re: the script editor command line -- it does print out eval results without wrapping them in sys.trace (so if you type "2+3" or "Object.keys(sys)", you get the expected printout -- unless of course I've broken that at some point without noticing). But clearly that UI leaves a lot to be desired. I'd like to do something about those floating panels anyway, so maybe I'll get to redesign the script editor at that point.

pavlov 16y ago

Thanks so much for the insightful comments! I know what you mean by the happy/terrifying timeline :) I thought hard whether it would be misleading to make the timeline look so similar, especially when it doesn't have the same functionality at this point, and the quirkiness of Flash keyframing has been such a source of frustration to users. But I decided that the big elements need to have a certain familiarity in order to make the app's purpose more obvious at a glance. (I guess it would be the same if I was making a photo editor: there are some UI conventions that are clearly outdated but people expect them from years of Photoshopping.) There is a document-level scripting environment, but it's not exposed to layers yet -- the JavaScript hooks to the compositing system don't exist yet, and the UI to tie it together with the timeline has not been designed. The way Flash implemented this is clearly pretty nasty, so I'd like to come up with something a bit cleaner, hopefully. Re: the script editor command line -- it does print out eval results without wrapping them in sys.trace (so if you type "2+3" or "Object.keys(sys)", you get the expected printout -- unless of course I've broken that at some point without noticing). But clearly that UI leaves a lot to be desired. I'd like to do something about those floating panels anyway, so maybe I'll get to redesign the script editor at that point.