Eventually, what will happen is a pluggable editor system and swapping between the new Mini UI and the old standard UI. The pluggable editor system will enable switching between the existing VectorEditor and OnlyPaths editors as well as SVG-edit. Possibly, OnlyPaths will be phased out as SVG-edit supports every feature of the former as well as many more. The priority editors with the new version will be VectorEditor (the Mini UI editor, based on Raphael so it works fine cross-browser, but is also much more limiting than the rest, including OnlyPaths which it partially replaces). SVG-edit is an awesome project which is being actively developed, and will add new features that may make the Ajax Animator viable for more than just stick figures. New features that will come from the transition could include Gradients, Curved paths, Wireframes, Zoom, Groups, Align tools, Rotation and Resizing (without bugs!), Polygon/Polyline editing, to name a small subset. It’s likely that SVG-edit will have far more features by the time it’s fully implemented. It’ll be awesome.

The SVG-edit UI won’t fit well with the Mini UI (which I actually like more), so the classical UI will be revived.

IE support is something really important to most users. especially with around 80% of the world still using it.

Raphael doesn’t seem that good, much worse than OnlyPaths SVG Renderer. But something that seems better is still Dojo.GFX

It supports Circles, Ellipses, Groups, Images, Lines, Draggable things, Paths, Points, Polylines, Rectangles, Text, Fonts, etc. and renders into VML, SVG and Silverlight.

It’s size isn’t too big either and there are CDNs for it. We could also learn from xDraw to design our editor.

I’ve located part of the problem. If I remove the reference to VMLRenderer.js, it suddenly starts working again. But how do I include it and get it to work still. I’m investigating.

EDIT 1:

Build 117 fixes the problem completely. it was simply because of mis-arrangement of the files. It was originally.

…
  <script type=”text/javascript” src=”../js/drawing/onlypaths.js”></script>

  <script type=“text/javascript” src=“../js/drawing/wrapper.js”></script> 
  <script type=“text/javascript” src=“../js/drawing/svgrenderer.js”></script>
  <script type=“text/javascript” src=“../js/drawing/vmlrenderer.js”></script>
…

  <script type=”text/javascript” src=”../js/drawing/onlypaths.js”></script>
  <script type=“text/javascript” src=“../js/drawing/svgrenderer.js”></script>
  <script type=“text/javascript” src=“../js/drawing/vmlrenderer.js”></script>
  <script type=“text/javascript” src=“../js/drawing/wrapper.js”></script>

Its now at Build 99. I feel that not much more can be done without the critical OnlyPaths component. I don’t have anything ready yet. An Ext port of OnlyPaths is underway, but it is not necessarily very stable, and some critical features (cross-platform drawing API) is not completed yet.

I rolled back one thing yesterday: the Advanced Color-Picker tool. They will be added again later, but I don’t want to aim too high for the initial 0.20 release, or else it may never get released. The standard (albeit small) color picking system is fine for now. It also is quite big, so not yet.

IE and Opera should work flawlessly now (Aside from browser-limitations). Most problems in the app are caused by those annoying commas in JSON errors (IE/Opera don’t like it when its {blah:stuff,super:happy,})

http://antimatter15.110mb.com/animator/Animator2/build/ajaxanimator.htm

Now, its at Ajax Animator Build 48. It has an improved “Properties” menu. The Drawing icons have been updated (to give you a taste of features of OnlyPaths that will be added). Notice that there are some features left out. Zoom will be done via the zoom button on the canvas toolbar, and panning won’t be necessary. I’m curious of whether I should or should not include the z-index ordering. Simply, the whole purpose of layers is that. and Layers seem much more managable, visible, and such.

Speaking of layers, the Layer browser part of the timeline has been added. It is currently just a simple Editor Grid (so you can inline edit the label!). I’m going to add http://cellactions.extjs.eu/ for the ability to remove/edit layers via a nice icon.

I have also almost sucessfully ported OnlyPaths to ExtJS. it turns out, that all prototype code is in richdraw.js, and it is as simple as replacing prototype code with Extjs counterparts.

such as this.blahlistener = this.blah.bindAsListener(this) Event.observe(this.explosion, “mouseexplode”, this.blahlistener)

becomes Ext.get(this.explosion).on(“mouseexplode”,this.blah,this);

Often, Ext code is simpler, and more consise, but other times it is not so.

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

Really, nothing much. There are some corrections to the About page, and some more icons. There is also a non-working Bug-Reporting tool.

I will try adding OnlyPaths soon, but it still needs much work. (and it’s Build 40 now!!!)