There are two reasons I didn’t get a lot done this week. One is pretty predictable: There was a holiday, and I spent some time on holiday stuff. It was pretty good. The other reason is that I spent a lot of time on finicky interface issues, which I guess is to be expected when you’re doing tool creation.
I expanded the side bars and added some more controls, but mostly what I did was create a new labeled slider class since that combination of a static textfield with a name, a slider, and a dynamic input textfield seemed to be one I was using an awful lot. I got that done and it seems to work pretty well, and between that and the drop down menu class I already created that handles most of the basic controls I’m going to need for this tool. Most.
I’m not too sure about this interface. I don’t really like the redundancy of it, and the controls are getting awfully crowded. I may play around with using vertical sliders instead of at least some of these horizontal ones, and it may be worth considering whether it would be better to consolidate the animation and frame controls into a single panel with parallel sliders for parameters which are shared between them. This would communicate the frame/animation paradigm less clearly, but it would be tidier and more space efficient overall.
it’s worth considering, at least. I went with what was pretty much the first interface concept that occurred to me, and it can always be worthwhile to step back for a bit of perspective.
Anyway I’ll decide on that stuff tomorrow, or soon at any rate. I’ve also found a minor but extremely tricky and annoying glitch in the sliders that keeps me from accessing the very top of the slider’s range on some sliders. I think it may have something to do with Flash’s drag function not recognizing sub-pixel distances, but I haven’t experimented to be sure. It’s a nuisance, anyway, and one I’ll probably keep picking at until I either figure it out or go crazy trying since the slider code is so important, not just for this tool but for pretty much all of my tools. That’s my excuse, anyway: It probably has more to do with stubbornness.
Hopefully I can get that stuff nailed down in relatively short order anyway so I can work on the remaining tricky parts, most notably the offset and registration point editing components, which were much of the justification for me creating this tool in the first place. I’d like to get this at least nearing completion by the time I write my next devblog, since that will be the new years retrospective one and I’ll be sad if I find I haven’t made much significant progress in that time.