I think dev-centric vector tools present a really good opportunity to improve the workflow between devs and designers and change the way many of us design web UI/animations. My main goals and interests:
- modular tools that are not encased within a monolithic editor
- animation/key frames
- renderer agnostic (for use with canvas/WebGL/CSS/etc)
- publishing path/animation state as a npm module, so that others could just "npm install spinny-preloader"
- ultimately building a suite of tools for more fluid motion graphics that render in real-time in the browser, but look just as good as something from After Effects
I wonder if some aspects of your tool could be reused for some of these goals.
Your tool is nice. The idea of doing vector graphics like this in the browser is very alluring. I worked on something similar for a long time, maybe you would find it useful:
The original idea was also to create an animation tool which could export to canvas code and/or SVG files with embedded JS. Ended up just being a generic SVG editor.
I eventually couldn't keep committing the time to develop it, but it was a fun project for a long while. Really got interesting when I started thinking about algorithms for something like Pathfinder (unfinished work: http://artur.co/pathfinder.html) and a freehand drawing tool which outputs cubic beziers (the crayon tool in my example). Also fun was coming up with data structures for undo/redo (mine still kind of suck).
Wow, looks great. I had a strong feeling that even a "really simple SVG editor" is an incredibly huge task for a single developer. Your app helps put things in perspective. :)
I always find "monolithic remakes" to be doomed from the start. So my current goal isn't to create the full app, but focus on it's different parts. Eg. the path-illustrator should be modular and standalone, and easily integrated into larger tools with perhaps different agendas. Same with timelines, SVG import/export, etc.
You should really see what the devtools team at Mozilla is working on. I think they already have many of those things either implemented or in progress.
I think dev-centric vector tools present a really good opportunity to improve the workflow between devs and designers and change the way many of us design web UI/animations. My main goals and interests:
- modular tools that are not encased within a monolithic editor
- animation/key frames
- renderer agnostic (for use with canvas/WebGL/CSS/etc)
- publishing path/animation state as a npm module, so that others could just "npm install spinny-preloader"
- ultimately building a suite of tools for more fluid motion graphics that render in real-time in the browser, but look just as good as something from After Effects
I wonder if some aspects of your tool could be reused for some of these goals.