The Ajax Animator (Wave/Mini interface version) now has support for basic Onion skinning, where the last keyframe is semitransparently placed in the background to aid in the positioning of the next keyframe. It’s now enabled by default at 20% opacity but can be disabled.

ajax-animator

To disable it, click the advanced button on the right side of the toolbar and find the entry labeled Onion Skinning, there you can set the onion skinning opacity or disable it with 0% opacity.

onion-skinning

Well, I worked on a sort of VNC-like solution to controlling native desktop applications from a remote PC. It’s an interesting concept, I settled with something less than easy to use, and less than really feasable. It’s a Proof of concept, and it’s likely I won’t work on it again (Like ForkSwif).

It is an application (module) on a hacked Ext 2.0 Desktop example that uses Ajax (Polling) to query a local PHP proxy to query a remote desktop. The remote desktop is running some software (powered by .NET sadly…) that captures the window’s contents, does a diff to see if there are modifications and where (only sends updates to changed parts of the screen, sorta like VNC). It base64 encodes it and sends it along HTTP to the proxy, which sends it to the javascript client.

The client can send events to be repeated on the remote desktop, currently only left mousedown and mouseup (so, basically only clicking), but using the Keyboard should be easy enough.

I imagine that a more feasable option is to create a javascript X11 client, taking proxied connections to a X session under SSH so it is better with window-specificness, and an overall more stable platform, so you could also run multiple applications simultaneously on the desktop.

here’s an early screenshot:

Controlling A native desktop app from a javascript desktop

Files here:

http://antimatter15.110mb.com/misc/coolstuff.zip

Extract desktop2 to your Apache server, start Windows Calculator (or another app of your choosing). Run Screen.exe, type the app title, press “Get Handle” and check the “Run Server” box. Navigate to the desktop.html (on your PHP-enabled apache), and start the “NV Window” app.

To be able to control the app, you have to set it to your network ip (not localhost) on a VM or a different computer. and configure sample.js at line 191.

proxy: "gdat.php?url=",
updateurl : "[http://localhost:12345](http://localhost:12345/)",
baseurl : "[http://localhost:12345/base](http://localhost:12345/base)",
showimg : false,
uinterval: 1000,
updater: null,
xoffset: -8,
yoffset: -28,

change localhost to the server’s IP. And tick “Control Desktop”

Note that you need firebug.

If i can think of a name for the app, i’ll be sure to creakte a google code project for it. so if anyone want’s the source, think of a name for it.

I reverted Ext 2.2 to Ext 2.1, so refresh your cache.

I did some updating yesterday, and along with it was the supposedly fully compatible Ext 2.2 update. And it wasn’t. It completely broke onlypaths :( I’m reverting now.

I added the beginnings of the Users system. There is an accordian panel for switching between Register and Login. The Login panel has the standard Username and Password (labeled User/Pass). The Registration panel is the same, with 2 instances of “Pass”. As every other panel in the app, there are nice little silk icons that accompany them.

today was just a few fixes, a pseudo-key-guide thing ported from the current stable one, and some minor updates. I included the Ext.ux.ColorPicker, and I guess i’ll work on porting OnlyPaths to Ext soon (it currently uses Prototype). I’m probably not going to include Prototype because OnlyPaths is a much (~11x) larger project than RichDraw, and therefore, it is mainly out of trying to improve size. (the project is currently ~20kb, but with onlypaths, will become ~100kb, plus ExtJS, will be ~1mb)

I might set up a blag and a separate site for the Ajax Animator (based off my alpha site from last release). I’m thinking of using WordPress/PHPBB but idk

Note: This is likely the first AND last release Ever. I’m gonna go on working on Ax v0.2 after this is finished (tomorrow)

I think its finally ready for showing people (still proprietary though :P). It is coded using Ajax/Long-Polling Comet, which as far as I’m concerned, is the first of it’s kind. It uses ExtJS for its user interface. it’s page load is ~2mb in size, and there is a huge amount of static data handled. Its following how most my apps are made: using the most client side code possible. I donno why, but it just is.

Since it uses Comet technology (specifically, long-polling), the requests made are minimized, and supposedly much more scalable. Requests are only made when necessary, and due to Comet technology, it only updates when there is something to update.

Since most of the processing is done on the client side, the server only has to handle the static content.

An interesting, albeit geeky feature, is a sort of command-line functionality. I attempted to build the entire system (somewhat like a Unix system) where most if not everything graphical is backed by a set of commands. Well, the real-time chatbox (which again, uses comet to reduce load on servers) detects if the input starts with the > character. if it does, then it parses it as a set of commands. Its relatively smart, so if you type in a global variable name, i’ll give you a JSON dump of the contents, and if its a function, i’ll call it, and if it is an expression then it’ll eval it.

There is no such plotline yet. Just random stuff that pops in my head (read: iWorld) and etc. there is also no title yet. (named: “Untitled”). Part of the game itself, is to build the game, using its built-in pixel-sprite-graphics editor.

Currently, it is restricted to modern browsers only. Firefox being my development platform (duh. what kind of js developer doesn’t use firefox/firebug? but i heard the IE8 dev toolbar is good cause its a clone of firebug..) will obviously work best. IE may or may not work. though platform agnosticism was one of the design goals. Opera/Safari is likely, but i’m not certain. most mobile browsers will fail (i tried apple iphone safari support, but it is weird around ExtJS)

It has some features, such as a relatively nice UI (well… nice compared to the others). Session saving, worlds, sprite/npc authoring, Character IDE, npc battles, pvp, store, panning, prelimary quests, items, friends, magic/abilities, a CLI, some crappy code, moderation, adminstration, etc.

Oh, and the password is “password” in case you wanna make new sprites. The URL is http://cometrpg.110mb.com/

Okay, so one day i felt crazy and changed everything by 1 decimal place because i don’t want this to seem misleadingly good. I mean, if it hits a 1.0 release, then some people would think it’s almost as good as Flash 1 (futuresplash animator) which it it isn’t even near yet.

So it should be 1.5 but now it’s 0.15 :D

Read more to find out the whole list, a summary of it would be axml2, UI polishing, save space, nicer code (but still hideous), css, users, tweening, finish partially completed ideas etc.

What’s done so far

• Redesigned Register UI
• Save Lots of code
• New Save/Open file format (around 5x faster, and 10 times smaller)
• Relocating stuff
• interactive tutorials
• Backwards Compat Mode
• for the first time it’s gonna be a legitimate GPLv2 project (I’m gonna include the gpl.txt file for once)
• replaced wz_tooltips with native ext.js ones
• Change save file to computer architecture
• change organization of Save/Open buttons in file menu (submenus)
• optimized stuff
• fixed bugs
• No more save/open window (now, single-purpose dialog alerts, much better)
• Progress bars
• User friendly upload error message (yay!)
• relocate css
• delete lot’s of stuff from user-management
• REAL SUPPORT FOR LINES/ELLIPSES, lines didn’t work for tweening, ellipses didn’t work for tweening or flash, and ALL suffered from a programming error causing line-widths to be messed up.
• FastMode …and more to come

I’ve not been releasing anything for a while, for several reasons:

1. I’m converting everything to the Ext UI (from textareas, tables, etc. to Ext grids, form fields) 2. I’m completely rewriting the timeline. including a host of new features much for speed. (several TIMES faster) mainly becuase it generates only 300 frames per layer by default, instead of 500, but automatically adds new frames DYNAMICALLY when more is needed. But the rewrite is sorta unstable 3. Tons of UI upgrades. A short list of changes from the top of my head are, a new login stystem (lot’s of fading effects) My Animations; list, faster animation loading. The user animation browser is completely changed-with stuff like Rating animations and comments coming. 4. Sorta goes in UI upgrades, is a new loading splash screen. It has a progress bar, showing status. And CSS is dynamically added, and loads from either the local server, or google code’s subversion (faster). 5. Cross Domain Ajax. The current ajax implementation only allows you to generate flash animations if you are on a php server with all the libraries/files installed. And sometimes you go to it from a proxy or google code beta or something. If that happens, you will not have any access to creating flash animations. So, soon it will curcumvent this restriction, by using a script tag hack, to load the animations from the server. Though the current ajax implementation will still be used for larger animations. And i might revive animation compression for this purpose. 6. Upgrading to Ext 2.0, this is not really happening NOW, but is being actively thought of. It’s not really a “painless” upgrade, with lot’s of stuff to modify/rewrite. 7. Everything has two options. One is to load from subversion, or the local server. It’s better if you load it from subversion, if you are mirroring it, or if your server is slow. And in many cases it’s really fast, and automatically gzip encodes the stuff. Great isnt it? so it has an option of loading all* (okay, most…) images and CSS from google code.

8. And even more stuff……