Instead of the multitude of screenshots that I usually do in these posts, i’m going back to the old system, a video demo. It’s a .mov so it’s not so fond of being played in the browser, it’ll work if you give it a few minutes to load, but I recommend right clicking the link and choosing “Save As”. It’s only 14mb this week due to some compression tweaks, enjoy!

TiMo Week 4 demo video (14mb)

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No screencast this week, sorry, busy day yesterday

The Inspector
Probably the most significant improvement this week is the Inspector, it lets you manually adjust the X, Y, Width, Height, and Color of any object to be exactly what you want, even after you’ve placed the object down. Say you want a square to cover the entire background, but you couldn’t quite drag it out far enough, ending up with white spaces around the edges. Just select the square from the Inspectors object list (currently it’s a bit hard because every square is named the same, this will change later) and set it to X:0, Y:0, W:800, H:600, you’re all set. The inspector is also temporarily serving as a timeline (I’ll get to that later).

The Image Tool
Not too much to say about this one, you can now add images to TiMo compositions (well, you can’t, muahahah, love being a developer). The Image tool has a special preview that will show you the image at a reasonable size without distorting it. I also added a feature called preview mode, I was animating with a 5 megapixel image, and I noticed it was very slow because the program had to keep loading the image (from memory, but still, 5 megapixels is a lot), so, I came up with preview mode. Preview mode makes a smaller version of big images to use while editing, so it goes fast, but then uses the full size image when exporting, to look good. It is a ‘mode’ so you can turn it off if you’ve got a lot of fast memory and stuff.

Simple Animation
Yup, I am officially ahead of schedule, with animation making a good start this week. Ok, so, you can only have one keyframe due to a super weird bug that keeps popping up from nowhere, as soon as I fix that it’ll be great. Also, another Microsoft-style bug (:p), sometimes animation gets messed up when you are animating multiple objects. As soon as I get those 2 (major) bugs fixed it’ll be great! But, if you can get around those limits, I already have Quicktime exporting working, with compression and everything, gotta love REALbasic, It took me 10 lines of code to save, export, and compress using the Quicktime class. You can also export still images … if anybody cares.

Development/Testing inspector
Umm, I don’t think this is anything that anybody really cares about (since it will not be in the final release, only the development and testing releases), but this is the Developer Inspector. It gives me a look at exactly what is in the database, to make it easier to debug. Not really too much to say about this one, you can kinda get a look at how the programs back end works, because I know SO MANY people care about that :p

Saving and Loading
Well, again, what is there to say about this. I now have my own XML based (easily human readable/editable) vector animation format that TiMo can read and write. Completely open and stuff (I think, I didn’t officially do anything, but since it’s easily readably and not patented or anything, I don’t think it counts as proprietary) so anybody could make another app that does stuff too it.

That’s all there is this week, nothing happening next week ’cause of vacation, and the week after will be mostly spent debugging, and I hope to add an actual timeline editor with actual keyframes too. Seeya in Florida!

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Tags: TiMo, Week, 2, Animation, Mac, Program