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I'm a founder and the technical lead- feel free to ask me questions!
by drcode 15y ago
I'm a founder and the technical lead- feel free to ask me questions!
- kumarshantanu 15y agoRoughly how many lines of production Clojure code is this? Is this made only using Clojure?
- drcode 15y ago95% of the code is client-side javascript (i.e. coffeescript) However, the server-side code is pretty complex for an app like this too (read up on creating a large zip file on App Engine some time) but I write very compact code... I'm almost embarrassed to say it's 700 lines of code on the server-side :-) since it feels wrong for so few lines of code to do so much.
- tzm 15y ago"it feels wrong for so few lines of code to do so much" I love this line.
- jashkenas 15y agoThe client-side math described sounds pretty interesting. Any chance you'll open-source the CoffeeScript bits? http://www.automatoon.com/documentation/faq.html http://www.automatoon.com/documentation/faq.html says that the player's source is up on GitHub, but that link appears to 404 at the moment.
- drcode 15y agosorry- now fixed.
- zaph0d 15y agoAwesome work, Dr. Barski! The site doesn't have your name anywhere, but I figured it was you from the drawing style. Yet another piece of awesomeness from you (after Land of Lisp).
- twfarland 15y agoGreat fun. Do you generate any of your javascript from clojure, or write it directly?
- drcode 15y agoI wrote it all as coffee script- Doing translation ads another layer of complexity I wanted to avoid this time.
- andresmh 15y agoI'm one of the people behind Scratch <http://scratch.mit.edu> http://scratch.mit.edu> and I can tell you that Automatoon is seriously cool. I can already see a lot of our users would like your tool. Kudos to you for empowering amateur users!
- drcode 15y agoyeah, definitely kindrid spirts, app-wise! Thanks for the kind words on automatoon!
- andresmh 15y agoI am a bit confused about the pricing model. Why did you decide to charge per creation rather than per month? Who is the expected audience? Again, great tool.
- drcode 15y agoMost of our audience is just people who play with it because its fun and tweet/email it to friends. This is how we hope to get publicity. Our secondary audience is web developers who need just a little bit of animation for a site and don't want to lose weeks becoming proficient in Flash/ToonBoom and paying for all the pricey authoring tools. We hope the second category can expense the premium cost for their projects to clients and won't mind paying a reasonable per-project price. However, we're certainly open to other pricing models... We just figure since the "iPhone App" era people are more comfortable paying one-time fees instead of signing up to a renewing prescription.
- andresmh 15y agoI see, but the iPhone apps people often pay for tools they can use to create multiple artifacts. Maybe it'd be best to charge less per creation (like $1) and remove more features from the free one (e.g. animations could expire in 1 day and can't be downloaded).
- 15y ago
- funcall 15y agoDr. Barski, you just blew the mind of my four year old son. I wish I'd made a video recording of his reaction. Automatoon is seriously cool.