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Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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