The name field will be replaced with buttons, and zoom may or may not be scrapped. Since gadgets only take up a fraction of the page (usually) it’s designed with size in mind, which may help on other space-constrained devices like netbooks.
It may have a cool feature like VectorEditor’s demo where you can draw off the canvas area.
As for why the tabs are now on top and the timeline is on the bottom, there’s no reason, I just think that that layout is more aesthetic.
And I might name it something other than the ajax animator, something just like Animator or something
You name doesn’t need to be explicit. Be imaginative, anything could do, as long as it is catchy.
By the way I wanted to point out a comparison of dojo.gfx and Raphael that I’ve written: http://www.lrbabe.com/?p=217
Although I prefer Raphael’s API and documentation, I found that it can be really slow to create numerous shapes at the same time in IE.
Your post was a really interesting read, I think Raphael is probably much more buggy than dojo.gfx mostly because there’s a larger development effort on the latter and that Raphael is a lot newer. *hopefully* nobody would make an animation in IE, and especially not on the magnitude of several hundred shapes.
WaveSplash (maybe because Flash was originally called FutureSplash Animator), or WaveMotion (cause waves move, lol). Or something else.