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Comment by drcode | Hacker News Reader

I'm a founder and the technical lead- feel free to ask me questions!

Awesome 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).

I'm one of the people behind Scratch <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!

yeah, definitely kindrid spirts, app-wise! Thanks for the kind words on automatoon!

I 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.

Most 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.

I 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).

The reason we don't want to "cripple" the free version is because we have low overhead and can afford to make low revenue at the outset- We'd rather focus on capturing a larger market (though it's always hard to say what the market really is with a new product)

Dr. 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.

Great fun. Do you generate any of your javascript from clojure, or write it directly?

I wrote it all as coffee script- Doing translation ads another layer of complexity I wanted to avoid this time.

Roughly how many lines of production Clojure code is this? Is this made only using Clojure?

95% 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.

"it feels wrong for so few lines of code to do so much"

I love this line.

The client-side math described sounds pretty interesting. Any chance you'll open-source the CoffeeScript bits?

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.

sorry- now fixed.

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