The design and implementation of an Open Source animation tool.

July 4, 2007

When You Wake Up in the Morning

One of the big issues we haven't addressed yet is what happens when you start up Moing from scratch, rather than opening an existing project. We pretty much have two options:
  1. Open a Moing project window with a blank project that doesn't exist anywhere as a file yet. This could be a little sticky implementation-wise, since Moing normally references assets relative to the location of the project file. We can probably limp along until absolute references until the project is saved, though.
  2. Show the user a minimal window which gives them the choice of creating a new project or opening an existing one (or just closing it). The "new project" option would throw the user right into a save dialog, perhaps with some extra widgets to set certain properties of the new project up front.
I don't have a strong opinion on which one is better, but I've got a feeling users would prefer the first one, even if it's a little icky implementation-wise.

A related issue is what we set up for initial asset directories. If we force the user to pick a filename and location up front, at minimum we could add the directory the project is saved to as an asset tab (though I'd rather encourage them to use subdirectories). If the user doesn't pick a location/filename up front, they're going to have to be on their own for picking asset directories, unless there are some global defaults. Maybe that's okay too.

3 comments:

Greg Bulmash said...

Start up with a new project wizard that creates the base files needed. Most "project" based programs do things this way.

MenTaLguY said...

Maybe. We'll certainly do that if it proves necessary, but I'm not a big fan of wizard interfaces. I'd like to preserve as much of an element of instant gratification for the user as I can.

Unknown said...

Also, when you get a great idea that you want to try right away with moing, having to select project location etc is a huge turn off. it slows you down and ruins your enthusiasm.