Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Radi, my HTML5 content creation app (Mac)

radiapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 39 posts

Re: Show HN: Radi, my HTML5 content creation app (Mac)

#21

Post by pavlov »

seanalltogether wrote: post #16
pavlov wrote: post #2

Radi is a side project of mine that has kept me occupied for the better part of 2010. I'm very happy to finally have it in a half-presentable state, just in time for 2011! What's that they say about the first release -- "if you're not embarrassed, you waited too long?" Well, this is that one for me :) It's scary to put this app out there to the whole world in its current condition, but I feel like I've reached a dead…

I won't lie, I'm having a hard time using this app. I spent awhile looking for a create keyframe buton and almost gave up before realizing how to do animations. I still don't know how to build custom shapes with curves or how to draw shapes that exist for a short duration. When I published the canvas element it didn't animate in the browser. Clearly you've solved a lot of interesting technical problems, but I feel ki…

Yeah, I completely see what you mean. That's pretty much what I meant by "abstract ambition" in my original post. I feel like I've spent a fair bit of time building modules that are generic enough to be the basis for a few different apps, but the whole doesn't yet do anything specific well enough.

That's why I felt like I need to release this sooner rather than later. It would be appealing to go on polishing the app for an imaginary customer who happens to be just like me (my other application, Conduit Live, went down that drain)... But it's healthier to face criticism and try to figure out if there's some potential customer group(s) out there that I didn't anticipate.

FWIW, I feel like there might be something interesting to be done in the intersection between realtime graphics and video on the web. Flash has a lot of cool technology, but nowadays you need to be a coder to take advantage of the new stuff like Pixel Bender shaders or the Alchemy compiler -- Adobe seems to have "outgrown" the designer audience who originally made Flash a success, and I think that's a mistake.

Re: your points about Radi -- there's a big hole in the publishing functionality currently, it doesn't export all keyframes. Sorry about that, I'm hoping to fix that ASAP. The keyframing UI is not very well thought out, and needs a lot more work. To make polygon shapes, choose "Draw Shape" from the toolbar and click away in the viewer. There's no exposed way to limit the shapes' visibility in the timeline either (internally there's a concept of empty keyframes same as in Flash, but it's not in the UI).

Re: Show HN: Radi, my HTML5 content creation app (Mac)

#22

Post by pavlov »

robterrell wrote: post #10

First of all, when they come and offer you a pile of money (and they will), please insist on a clause that they release it. Someone may try to bury it. Anyway, I had fun playing with it. The timeline gives me happy/terrifying Director/Flash flashbacks. I can't figure out how to make an animation cycle in the timeline (i.e. like a walk animation) without cheating & creating keyframes by moving stuff to a slightly diff…

Thanks so much for the insightful comments!

I know what you mean by the happy/terrifying timeline :) I thought hard whether it would be misleading to make the timeline look so similar, especially when it doesn't have the same functionality at this point, and the quirkiness of Flash keyframing has been such a source of frustration to users. But I decided that the big elements need to have a certain familiarity in order to make the app's purpose more obvious at a glance. (I guess it would be the same if I was making a photo editor: there are some UI conventions that are clearly outdated but people expect them from years of Photoshopping.)

There is a document-level scripting environment, but it's not exposed to layers yet -- the JavaScript hooks to the compositing system don't exist yet, and the UI to tie it together with the timeline has not been designed. The way Flash implemented this is clearly pretty nasty, so I'd like to come up with something a bit cleaner, hopefully.

Re: the script editor command line -- it does print out eval results without wrapping them in sys.trace (so if you type "2+3" or "Object.keys(sys)", you get the expected printout -- unless of course I've broken that at some point without noticing). But clearly that UI leaves a lot to be desired. I'd like to do something about those floating panels anyway, so maybe I'll get to redesign the script editor at that point.

Re: Show HN: Radi, my HTML5 content creation app (Mac)

#23

Post by snprbob86 »

Very cool! Nice job.

I noticed this: "Radi makes creating vector graphics easier with its unique autosmoothed shapes. When you apply smoothing to a corner point, all your control points lie precisely on the shape's outline. There are no separate "handles" or "tangent points" to be tweaked outside of the actual shape."

Just wanted to point out that, to me, that sounds like an anti-feature. Maybe it's a nice alternative tool for quick, smooth shapes, but I've watched many an illustrator tweak the hell out of those things to get exactly the right curves and sharp angels. I also remember reading a story about how Microsoft spent weeks observing video of expert Adobe suite users with various Pen-tools to get the feel of the handles juuust right for an easy transition to Expression suite products.

This is a cool side project and letting HN hammer on it is a great start, but you're going to need some artists to hammer on it before you've got something really special.

Re: Show HN: Radi, my HTML5 content creation app (Mac)

#24

Post by RyanDScott »

pavlov wrote: post #2

Radi is a side project of mine that has kept me occupied for the better part of 2010. I'm very happy to finally have it in a half-presentable state, just in time for 2011! What's that they say about the first release -- "if you're not embarrassed, you waited too long?" Well, this is that one for me :) It's scary to put this app out there to the whole world in its current condition, but I feel like I've reached a dead…

Couldn't this be used as a replacement for Flash? I know one of your selling points is that you can do some rather amazing visual imagery without needing any programming skills; but what if you coupled a basic image/video/animation editor with scripting abilities (javascript)? You would have a nice alternative for tired-of-flash developers who create sites like the Droid product page, pretty much every movie landing page, and every video game product page. You know Adobe is already working on it, and Dreamweaver is already integrating HTML5. But build something on open standards, not tightly integrated to any one image/vector editing software, and you would have a strong market.

Re: Show HN: Radi, my HTML5 content creation app (Mac)

#27

Post by kmfrk »

pavlov wrote: post #21
seanalltogether wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't lie, I'm having a hard time using this app. I spent awhile looking for a create keyframe buton and almost gave up before realizing how to do animations. I still don't know how to build custom shapes with curves or how to draw shapes that exist for a short duration. When I published the canvas element it didn't animate in the browser. Clearly you've solved a lot of interesting technical problems, but I feel ki…

Yeah, I completely see what you mean. That's pretty much what I meant by "abstract ambition" in my original post. I feel like I've spent a fair bit of time building modules that are generic enough to be the basis for a few different apps, but the whole doesn't yet do anything specific well enough. That's why I felt like I need to release this sooner rather than later. It would be appealing to go on polishing the app…

I don't think it can be stressed enough how important it is to prevent feature creep while you still have the chance.

I can't imagine the repercussions of cutting down the program down the line after people have acquainted themselves with it - to the point of feeling completely entitled.

Re: Show HN: Radi, my HTML5 content creation app (Mac)

#28

Post by Corrado »

Can it consume external data sources easily? At my company we have an XML RSS feed that I would like to transform into some sort of infographic display (dynamic bar charts, moving pie charts, tables, etc.)

Currently, we are solving this problem with a mish-mash of Ruby/Sinatra and jQuery/Raphaël but its not clean or easy. Would this be something that Radi could help us build and maintain?

Re: Show HN: Radi, my HTML5 content creation app (Mac)

#29

Post by warrenwilkinson »

I hadn't seen this before, but on your main site, because you start talking about HTML5 so early (and the first headline says HTML5), I thought the site was a tutorial about the benefits of HTML5.

In my opinion I think you should reorder your site so that the first headline and blurb explain that Radi is a Mac Application for producting HTML5 compatible vector animations. The stuff about HTML5 can probably be below the fold.

Post reply on HN