Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

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This is from my point of view as an experienced developer and VFX artist, including in-depth knowledge of AE.

    A 30fps limit is surprising
    23.976 as an fps does not seem to be dealt with gracefully
    Clicking report bug should take me to a bug report form with info
    Interacting with "rectangle" is surprising because the corners aren't draggable. Probably should default to full size
    I should be able to wind input fields by clicking and dragging on them, such as for rotation
    When I drag keys around in the dope sheet, and let go with momentum, they appear to keep moving and "settle" in a sort of random place. They should not do that
    I see that this momentum behavior is also in the play head in the timeline. It really should not do that.
    Putting in a value in the dope sheet should be enabled, and it should automatically set a key
    I liked the visualizations of the easing, but it should probably be communicated with the keyframe's icon shape in the dope sheet like it does in AE.
    It is difficult to move a key to the beginning of the timeline.
    Architecturally, the preview rendering probably has to work the way it does in After Effects. Guaranteeing a real time visualization is pretty important.

I kind of stopped there because it's a bunch of goal-less fiddling. This is really great, there is a tremendous amount of product development. Hopefully you will think deeply about your audience and objectives, and the amount of product development that goes into After Effects.

Thank you for your feedback, the 30fps limit is temporary, until I have fully tested perfs with video files at a higher framerate can you tell me more about 'and let go with momentum', not sure what you mean? Is it about loss of precision, not being responsive, bad snapping to closest frame?

When I click and drag on the timeline play bar or a key frame widget in a layer; then, if I release the mouse button with velocity; the play head and key frame keep moving for a little bit, even though I am not dragging them anymore, as though they have momentum and are being dragged to a stop; the widgets should not behave this way.

The big picture feedback is that often there is an alignment between “I have a lot of ideas for unique UX I want to implement” and “I want to wake up this morning and work on this all day.” IMO just copy AE’s UX affordances first if your goal is to make something you want other people to use. Blender spent a decade in the doldrums until it found an audience the moment they relented and copied Maya and Unity’s superior, conventional controls.

> IMO just copy AE’s UX affordances first if your goal is to make something you want other people to use.

@clementpiki I second this advice and strongly suggest to document it as a guideline for your project as soon as possible. Surf on the shoulders of AE's UI giants!

Otherwise a small but vocal number of devs users who implicitly love FOSS software will end up rationalizing all the little UI quirks as features. Worse, their lack of expertise in UI design will be proportional to their level of energy and post length on all your communication channels. It's the epitome of bike-shedding. But if you just standardize on "whatever AE does" nobody will spend a moment advocating for putting quirks into the UI. (Plus they'll be very forgiving about quirks since it's obvious that getting the UI to work exactly like a proprietary piece of software is a very difficult problem.)

The greatest failing GIMP had (and still does) is that has almost nothing in common with Photoshop UI-wise - or numerous other photo editing tools. I've used them all my life and every time I open GIMP, I can't seem to do anything.

It's like walking into a car dealership and they tell you their car is free, and you ask where the seats are, and they say "why, on the ceiling, of course. We didn't want to copy all those other car companies."

You pop open the hood and there's no engine. "Where is the engine?" "On the roof!"

"Where is the gas tank?" "It's that plastic bag you keep on your lap."

The inertia issue you described is now fixed. Thank you for pointing it out. Also I agree with the Gimp comments from below

Although this seems like the right way to go about it, isn't there some kind of limit to how much you _can_ copy AE before it becomes a copyright issue?

You can't copyright capabilities. I believe an exact copy of AE is perfectly legal so long as it isn't fooling people into thinking it's AE, and doesn't use any of the original code.

The visual look can be protected, some novel or distinctive features can be patented or trademarked (like Amazon patented one click purchases??), but the core functionality is up for grabs

The big Oracle / Google lawsuit a few years back is a good example. Google rebuilt the Java compiler to avoid paying licencing fees (?), and argued that because they did it from the API specs, without referring to the existing code, it was aboveboard. The functionality is not copyrightable, just the specific implementation.

Have you considered opening a staging or experimental branch on a subdomain perhaps? I think people would definitely be interested in testing out new features before they're released without hosting it themself, and I believe you said hosting Pikimov is very cheap.

This is easiest to do by moving things far too fast, if I pick up a ball and 'flick' it with my mouse, then let go of the button and mouse, the ball ends up moving along further.

If you can't duplicate it, I can send you a short screen recording (I would just upload, but where do you upload <1MB binary files nowadays that isn't an ad-filled mess?)

swisstransfer.com, up to 25GB for free

pixeldrain

it has a web player built in as well.

Looks good, here's a link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/EyFC2sqY

"Doesn't support NTSC framerates" is a "tremendous amount of product development"?

To me, it's "author / project lead has no background in the industry or even basic knowledge of video."

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