-----Original Message----- From: Christophe Dehais [mailto:christophe.dehais@...400...] Sent: woensdag 12 maart 2008 12:18 To: Martin Owens Cc: Engelen, J.B.C. (Johan); jon@...235...; bryce@...1798...; john.cliff@...400...; inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Animation (was: Re: Inkscape / GSoC '08 proposal)
OK I see.
Unfortunately tackling the foundations of a rock solid implementation is the core motivation for me. I'd like to have the basis for a very general SMIL implementation, that could possibly handle any animatable attributes. The other motivation is to dive into Inkscape codebase in order to learn it, so the plugin approach doesn't appeal much to me. Also I may be wrong but the plugin approach is kind of limited regarding the UI that can be added to Inkscape (see [1] for I'm thinking about) I won't deny that your proposal seems the quickest path to have something working.
As for a GSoC proposal, I'd try to narrow the goals to some simple objectives and maybe write a blueprint.
If I read your intentions correctly, you should not aim to get something working :) (not fully at least).
What for GSoC is possible, I think, is:
1. Make Inkscape not forget svg animation attributes (basically make the SPObject thingies that are already present for svg:rect svg:path svg:g etc but then for svg:animation). Don't let the objects do anything :) because that alone would mean more than one GSoC project I think. Perhaps Inkscape already doesn't 'forget' the attributes, that'd be awesome, and then this step vanishes.
2. Make simple UI to edit svg animation attributes. Onion-skinning etc sound like a GSoC project of their own! Really, it depends on how much time you are going to invest, but have a look at the size of last year's gsocprojects. Probably the simplest you can come up with is already enough work! So perhaps you could pick one part of animation attributes UI and make something for that. (i.e. only make the timeline UI, with enough simplicity and complexity)
Now that I think of it, it would have helped me to have an LPE editing mockup before I started. (more precise than what I had in my head) So perhaps you should (like you already did) start gsoc with as precise a UI description as possible. (for example also, who writes to XML, what will be written to XML, which XML changes should trigger an update of which widgets, etc...
Cheers from a fellow GSoC2008 aspirant, Johan