I've recently tried to pick up the pace with updates to Radi. I'm hoping to finish the first draft of a manual soon, and to get some more concrete examples done. (Producing sample content and tutorials is really hard, because it's not enough to know the app, but you have to be able to see it through the new user's eyes -- very difficult for me when I've worked on the app for so long...)
I'm currently pretty excited about the possibilities of using <canvas> on top of <video>, so that's something I'd like to write some documentation about... If there are any other ideas about topics of interest, I'm all ears!
A suggestion for helping you see things with fresh eyes -- read aloud. Seriously, shut your door, open up the app and read the instructions aloud and try to follow them. Note everything down that is missing or unclear (print the instructions and buy a red pen.) And really read aloud, whispering or mouthing isn't quite enough. It makes a difference to how you hear things.
Oh and p.s. that looks pretty damm good. I do research on visual programming, so I was interested to take a look at your conduit app (reminds me of toolbox) as well. I particularly like the comments you have attached to edges in the graph, sadly I literally thought I'd invented that idea this morning :-)
Thanks, and great suggestion about reading aloud, I'll give it a try. I'm pretty sure that the typical "computer manual" style of acronym-loaded, compressed run-on sentences is not a delight to the ear :)
I'd really like to do cross-platform. I've ported the rendering core to Direct3D as part of a previous project, so the fundamental pieces are portable to Windows... But there are also some important dependencies on Mac-only components like QTKit and the Cocoa version of WebKit. These would need to be replaced by Windows-native code.
In other words, it's not entirely out of the question on the long term, but I haven't really done the work to even figure out the difficulty.
Can someone who has done some graphic design do a write up and comparison of this and the Adobe Edge preview? I'd be interested to see how they compare, especially in terms of the ease of creating stuff and the quality of the output - speed, browser support, size.
The big difference is that Hype and Edge use CSS properties for animation. The image composition is built up from <div> elements whose style properties are modified by JavaScript. This means the animation capabilities are limited to those properties that can be expressed using CSS -- although this is not such a bad limitation at all, because CSS3 is now so powerful and starting to be widely supported.
Radi operates on a lower level to render its animations in HTML. Layers in Radi don't directly become <div> elements in the output; instead, the layer content is rendered either within <canvas> or <video> elements. You can use both together, for example using canvas to overlay some dynamic graphics context on top of a video.
To me, the capability to render content seamlessly to either video or canvas is the most unique thing about Radi. Although I'm still not quite sure how to express that as a benefit to the user, rather than a tech-spec curiosity... :)
(It's possible to do some limited CSS animation in Radi as well. There's a concept called "timeline events" that can be used to animate top-level element properties, so you can also use this model of animation on top of the canvas/video rendering... But it's currently limited to opacity only, so this feature is very much in its infancy.)
I know this is a subjective thing, but I think the app's graphical style is somewhat ugly. If I'm supposed to be creating an attractive animation for my site, I want to be surrounded by a similarly attractive workspace. I know it's a nitpick, but it's why I write code in Coda, not Vim, TextMate, BBEdit, or anything else. I'm fickle like that.
I see what you mean... The trouble for me is that I'm working on Radi alone. Coming up with an attractive custom UI style is a big undertaking with an inherently uncertain result.
It feels like a safer use of my time to work on features, and just aim for a "boring but reasonably professional grey" appearance for the interface. I know that many artists actually prefer grey UIs so that it doesn't compete with the actual content.
I've tried to use Cocoa-native controls wherever possible, and that also limits the UI possibilities quite a bit. The overall look needs to be rather neutral so that changes in the Aqua look don't mess up the custom-drawn controls. (Recently Lion had a big change in most of the standard controls' appearance, but IMHO the updated look made Radi look a bit better.)
Radi is a side project of mine that finally saw the light of day 7 months ago, when I announced it here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2040844
I've recently tried to pick up the pace with updates to Radi. I'm hoping to finish the first draft of a manual soon, and to get some more concrete examples done. (Producing sample content and tutorials is really hard, because it's not enough to know the app, but you have to be able to see it through the new user's eyes -- very difficult for me when I've worked on the app for so long...)
I'm currently pretty excited about the possibilities of using <canvas> on top of <video>, so that's something I'd like to write some documentation about... If there are any other ideas about topics of interest, I'm all ears!