Show HN: Wick – A free and open-source creation suite | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Wick – A free and open-source creation suite

wickeditor.com

322 pointsazamat-bagatov63 comments

Pretty cool idea, though it's advertised rather vaguely. It's basically an HTML5-based Flash alternative with an HTML5-based editor.

The menu bar disappeared after a few seconds and I couldn't get it back, I'm on fresh Chromium.

Agreed, if the creator added something like "media creation suite" instead of "creation suite" it'd be a bit more clear.

Creator here!

Yup, I'm still trying to find the right wording for it; "media creation suite" is definitely more descriptive! Thx

"Media" is still too vague. I would be blunt and say "Flash-like content authoring tool for HTML5" or "HTML5 Interactive Animation Editor".

Not creator here. "Flash-like content authoring tool for HTML5" isn't catchy at all, that's like calling an iPod "Digital music playing device". Branding and marketing count.

Yeah - I'd call it "animation" instead of "flash".

Flash-like content authoring tool for HTML5 would be a good headline for the Hacker News post, but not for the product.

I think for a short name, "creation suite" is fine, but a short description on the page would be handy. The demo does help, certainly.

Looks interesting, anyway, I'll have to check it out to for playing with.

Well, first it's not a "suite" - it's just an app. In the industry we call it a Rich Media Editor. If "rich media" seems too old school, you can call it an HTML5 Media Toolkit.

Or Vector Based Animation tool

How about "Steady," har har, because it's not Flash.

The term “creator” as applied to authors implicitly compares them to a deity (“the creator”). The term is used by publishers to elevate authors' moral standing above that of ordinary people in order to justify giving them increased copyright power, which the publishers can then exercise in their name. We recommend saying “author” instead.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Creato...

The industry term is "creative", i.e. this app is for creatives. Author is generally applied for written material.

"2D animation software" and "multimedia authoring" are both pretty concrete terms. "Creator" suffers from vagueness more than anything.

Please, SpaceDingus9000, do not drink this Kool-Aid. Media Creation Suite is just fine here in the real world.

This is great.

If it had some basic drawing tools integrated (+ a bit more polish on the UI), it would be a killer tool for kids and non-programmers to get their feet wet with some core programming concepts and visual creativity. It's basically all there right now, but the hassle of creating assets externally and importing them is just an extra barrier that may frustrate inexperienced users.

Hi dperfect,

I'm one of the co-creators of Wick. We're in the process of getting those finished! We'll be tweeting / posting about all of our major updates if you're interested.

Wick looks like a great start to finally filling that huge, gaping hole where there should be a tool. Thank you for creating this. I hope it becomes hugely popular and quickly becomes a polished tool.

I have bookmarked this and will definitely be using it the next time I have my kiddo at the computer so I can show her how to make something move on the screen.

Increasingly, I find myself perfectly happy to use online tools for certain tasks. I'm a huge proponent of having local tools, local file storage, and for desktop computing in general. But there are amazing convenience gains to having browser-based applications. That's doubly true for this since the delivery platform is also the browser.

Thanks for the kind words!

I was thinking something along the same lines using Google Drawings. Just the local to cloud clipboard, and smart image/text alignments makes local image editing software (Paint etc) go extinct.

This is nice, I really missed the Flash IDE's paradigm for game creation. The timeline and visual nature of the IDE made making a game a hell of a lot easier, especially for people without real CS education (kids). It looks like you write JS with Wick though, which I think is better for kids to learn how to interact with the web than AS3 ever was.

This looks like it could be a more modern interpretation of what Apple's Hypercard was trying to be.

Flash did this very well but, the technology and corporate ecosystem around it was terrible so it was good that we got rid of it.

This seems poised not to have those burdons. I wish the creators of this would do two things: 1. Get a sustainable funding model - Patreon seems pretty good for this. 2. Make indepth user testing (with non-technical people) a heavy priority within their culture.

The internet needs something for making media that isn't Adobe or Facebook or Google or Microsoft. Something that is open and financed directly by the people who want to use it and people that care about a free and open internet should happen.

If the authors of this project open a Patreon page, I pledge $20/mo for an entire year. I will also match $5/mo for anyone else willing to join me in supporting this project.

FYI: I have never met nor spoken to any of the Wick team members. I just got inspired to do something other than just throw out random advice on the internet today.

To the Wick team: PM me if you are interested in starting a Patreon.

Hey! Creator here -

I agree, it's super important to get Wick self-sustaining as soon as possible. Part of that is definitely to start getting some core developers involved and having a way to reimburse everyone for their time~~

Hit me up on twitter (@zrispo) or on the github repo, let's talk!

This is awesome! Wick reminds me of HyperCard. I fell in love with programming as a kid because of HyperCard (and its HyperTalk programming language). I hope Wick likewise inspires another generation of hackers.

It's good that somebody's trying to fill the (massive) boots of Flash. Yes, flash is clunky, and it's soundly mocked around here for good reason, but it filled a genuine need, and was used to create a lot of cool content (Eddsworld, Animator vs Animation, Weebl's stuff, My Little Pony (yes, really: look it up)), and sparked an age of experimentation in game design, kicked off casual gaming, and allowed easier publication of and access to independant games than ever before (Speaking as one of the many who have lost countless hours to N, Run 2, Meat Boy, FreeRider 2, Fancy Pants Adventures, PacXon, Portal The Flash Version, SHIFT, The World's Hardest Game, This is The Only Level (1, 2, and 3), Exit Path, Escape the <x>, Sushi Cat, and countless other games).

I love this so much — I got into programming with AS2 in the Flash MX days and although it's great that HTML5 replaced Flash as a platform, the lack of a replacement tool has left a bit of a hole in my creative life. Is there a roadmap for motion tweens?

Hi idreyn,

we actually have motion tweens implemented! (They're just not represented in the GUI as well as they should be yet) We'll have a demo up for them soon!

That's great to hear, thanks!

What is a 'creation suite'?

Just saw the right arrow description thing and played with a bit (it's in-browser) -- seems like toward the Flash IDE.

Creation Suite is the Adobe brand for their suite of creative software tools.

The Adobe brand name is Creative Cloud.

Sorry - originally it was Creative Suite (2003 - 2013). Adobe used a new product name when they switched to subscriptions.

Minor victory today. After pushing all my keys I finally figured out how to play "Flappy Ghost".

The Flappy Ghost demo made my day. Also fun to look around in the editor to see how it was implemented.

Tried for 5 minutes. Couldn't get past the 2nd pipe. With a HQ mouse (Naga). What am I doing wrong? Just bad?

If you couldn't get past the 2nd pipe I think that means it's a successful Flappy Bird clone.

If it ain't bad, it ain't Flappy.

What's the license? (I don't see any explicitly mentioned in the source repo.)

Looks like they just added the LGPL license file.

Just now added a GPLv2 - thanks for the heads-up

Nice work, I like it. Two peeves:

1) Mobile is broken (iPad). Maybe you don't expect a lot of mobile users but it's not a lot of extra work, and can be productive for large tablet users.

2) I would prefer that twitter not be used for your dev blog.

I balked at the output, which was 1.9MB for KitchenSink.html which showed up in editor as 3,902 lines and 707,605 columns, by simply adding 3 characters to the template provided.

Could this be optimised? Having not a single file as output? As much as I dislike CDNs most of the time, if this is to be federated to cache most of this fluff on a central CDN option (or local CDN) seems to be sensible, or at least let it be cached somewhere.

^ Wish to be be critically useful.

This site doesn't work for me on iOS: the content doesn't fit on screen and the scroll is broken (i.e. I cannot scrol at all)

Same for me in chrome on android 6

Closed in rage mode on mobile.

Zoom disabled? Rly?

Sorry 'bout that, the mobile website is currently a lil borked

sorry for the rude comment. It's hurting me when someone seems to have copy&paste code without reading it, and is killing mobile experience by that.

To make it more helpful: Would be nice if you could remove "user-scalable=no" from the <meta name="viewport" ...> value, maybe also the minimum and maximum scale. It's not very helpful to limit the user in it's ability to zoom the page on mobile. Some people don't get the overview they needed, others are unable to read the site because they can't zoom in.

So it helps a lot to just remove that limitation.

Thanks. That's way more helpful and actionable. I submitted a pull request and now it's merged in. Which device are you using?

https://github.com/zrispo/wick/issues/311

https://github.com/zrispo/wick/commit/78ec7e4929435b2513abba...

It looks like it wasn't tested on (or designed for?) mobile. Works great on desktop Chrome, though.

There is a difference in "not optimized for" and actively killing it with "user-scalable=no".

Agree. This project will be 100x more useful/popular if it also works well on mobile. But this is a Show HN. Pointing out a frustrating UX bug is fine. However, it's a new project. Bugs would be expected at this point. Going into rage mode isn't helpful.

You're right. Was a bit rude, but reflected my feel in that moment. It's very frustrating when developers kill mobile experience by copy&pasting html boilerplate without even reading the stuff they paste.

who would like to develop a game on mobile device anyway? ^^

Not 100% sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but there are two legit use cases:

1) Design on desktop, but publish for playing on mobile phones/tablets.

2) Design on iPad/tablet with connected keyboard. Play on tablet/phone with or without keyboard. (A phone would probably be too small for the Wick editor, but I can see it being useable on a larger touchscreen.)

To put this in clearer terms, there's a huge difference between building a model ship on your desk, and building a model ship in a bottle on your desk.

Putting a well-instrumented usable UI together is hard enough without scope creep including doing a UI that's also useable on a phone.

I agree that editing on a small screen-sized phone would be silly. But targeting phones for playback of Wick-created content would be a worthy goal. Also a worthy goal would be making the editor work on tablets if the screen was big enough (iPad, iPad Pro, etc.).

You might want to take a look at Fabric.js, while it lacks keyframe based animations, it does support other things.

http://fabricjs.com/kitchensink

Hi aub3bhat,

We're actually using Fabric.js for the editor canvas!

I think desktop tools with an easy to version control file format fits better with branch based app development. Use Electron and it's super easy. Automatic updates also

+1 for reminding me of the flash editor and keyframe animations!

Good work!

I been thinking about self-replicating systems and seems to me that the web could be a great medium for them.

A tool that's capable to build itself.

I love the maplestory gifs when you press the right arrow :)

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