Show HN: Radi v0.8 - my HTML5 animation app now has brushes, shape poses, etc. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Radi v0.8 - my HTML5 animation app now has brushes, shape poses, etc.

radiapp.com

45 pointspavlov10 comments

I've finally finished another update to my Radi app. It's a Mac design tool that can be used to produce animation and videos, with output to HTML5.

This update adds a number of tools that hopefully make the app more useful for real work. The big one is frame-by-frame animation of shapes, so you can do traditional 2D animation. There's also new support for Markdown blocks with an integrated style editor, so you can easily edit rich text that becomes clean HTML.

I've also updated the landing page somewhat: http://radiapp.com/ ... There's now a comparison box with other HTML5 animation editors, and more screenshots. Would love to hear your comments about it...

I struggled to find the demos from a deep-linked page. I think a nav item called "examples" would be handy. It's the most important thing I want to see with this kind of software, as the proof is really in the pudding.

Also investing the time in creating some more impressive animations would really sell this to people. If you don't have the knack for it yourself, outsource it to a designer or, dare I say it, make a competition out of it.

There's a handful of examples at the top of the landing page (blue box with heading "Watch some examples"). Is it poorly placed or too small maybe...? I'll add a nav item for it to the menu.

Anyway, I hear what you say about the need for impressive examples. I don't have the talent for that; my current examples are certainly not too interesting.

I guess I'll have to invest some money into it... (Since Radi is free, it's not making me anything, and so far it's been strictly a hobby project. Maybe it's time to take it a bit further.)

Any future in porting it to Win? Any inspiration from Adobe Edge? I am happy that there are more and more potential replacements for flash in this respect, hopefuly this will also make it easier for versioning control and branch merges.

I made a preliminary effort towards a Windows port a few months ago. It's running, but not really usable.

Here's a screenshot: http://radiapp.com/radi-windows-sshot-20110805.jpg

I haven't looked deeply at Edge since the initial release. One fundamental difference is that Radi's output is completely custom rendering into either <canvas> or <video>, while Edge uses CSS for animation. I wrote a blog post about that with lots more detail: [1]

Although there's some overlap, the approaches are basically complementary. Hence I'm hoping to make Radi into not so much a competitor to apps like Edge and Hype, but rather a more creation-oriented tool that can be used together with these other apps that focus more on building entire sites.

Now that e-books are becoming basically HTML5 packages, I'm hoping to find some opportunity for Radi in that market as well... But I haven't done any deeper research into that yet.

[1] http://lacquer.fi/pauli/blog/2011/08/why-radi-uses-canvas/

Wow nice, great Blog post, that should be a HN link in it's self! I will be watching for an windows version and keep up with your twitter/blog.

For a hobby project, it is awesome and impressive. Things like this light a fire under my ass, and remind me I need to get cracking and start something awesome like this.

Congrats.

Thanks :)

To be fair, I didn't start from scratch because a substantial part of Radi is in frameworks that I originally made for Conduit Live, my bread-and-butter product [1]. I've been working on it for about 5 years, and with Radi, I was exploring the idea of doing something "webby" with these imaging/video software pieces that I had at hand.

[1] http://lacquer.fi/conduitlive.html

this is awesome. any ideas of open sourcing, licensing, price range etc.? you could market this as a competitor to the recently announced iBooks Author

You need a big, blue "Download BETA!" button.

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