From: Markus Gebhard <ukgh@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de>
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 16:19:06 +0100
To: Hakim Cassimally <hakim@earthling.net>
Subject: Re: (more comments) Re: Jave

Hello Hakim,

<snip>

Now about your comments on JavE:

Movie Editor - navigation: When you are at the beginning of a 200 frame animation, the only way to get to the end is to click on "Next >>" 200 times. I've emailed Markus Gebhard with this as my number 1 problem: he says it's due to be fixed in the next release!

I have already fixed this problem. There is now a scrollbar to easily scroll to the desired position. Maybe you will be able to test this simple feature soon.

Ideally single or groups of frames could be duplicated, deleted or moved by dragging and dropping!

I could offer a dialog box with a list of frame numbers. There you can select multiple frames and perform some of the operations you request. Dragg and drop will be a little problematic though...

Also, you should be able to move copied frames from one movie to another...

You can do that (one by one...): open one movie, navigate to the frame you want to copy, press ctrl-c in JavE (or hit edit->copy), load the other movie, navigate to the desired position, press ctrl-v in JavE and the content is copied to the movie. Ok, this is no good way for copying half a movie...

Export to HTML: i.e. turn an Ascii still into HTML ready text (in <PRE> tags and with angle-brackets escaped).

Just use the "Export result" button in the top bar. I maybe will move this to the file menu with export to files somewhen.

Movie titles: The .jmov format contains meta data for the Movie Editor program, date, and Creator name and email. But it's missing a 'Title' field.

The jmov-format is extensible (the player is open source and I am always open to ideas for extensions of the file format). So here you are: A line starting "!:" in the jmov file will from now on be the title of the jmov. Example:

!:My very first Ascii animation in JMOV format
J:A80 50 %0%0%0
T:Freehand Generic

Clip editor: I'd like to be able to rename or delete clips (or move them from category to category.

Has been on my list since before many releases ago... I will add it as soon as I start using swing gui elements. This will propably be in the release after the next one.

Hey ho, I suppose I can manually edit the clipart file till then ;->

You sure can - it is simple :)

(and would it be possible/useful to have hierarchies of clip categories?)

You are so right and I have so few time...

Delete line: i.e. delete a line and shift the rest up (see my notes on the comic strip above).

Using the text tool: switch the cursor to insert-mode and hit backspace at the first character of the line you want to have deleted.

Scripting: OK now maybe I'm being silly... but... JavE is already advertised as being 'part Emacs', and what would Emacs be without Lisp powering it? Admittedly for 99% of uses it's irrelevant, but I think that a simple macro use should be easy to implement (probably an extension of the multiple level undo/redo - also the Movie file records which tool performed each action, so I think that there's already some sort of scripting driving it.

First of all: There is no kind of scripting in JavE - the mechanism for undo/redo/crash recovery and animation are very very simple and stupid. As a matter of fact the ascii animation format jmov and the "save 'making of' as jmov" was something I have got for free from the undo/redo mechanism.

I have already thought about writing an API to allow other developers using my algorithms - or to use them by writing algorithms like the one you want. But I did not receive positive response to that idea and did not write the API. In fact I am glad that I did not yet spend time on it, because the algorithms evolved a lot and there are still significant changes. Also there are so many algorithms, tools and options - it would take a lot of time designing an API to provide a useful set of them... I think I better spend that time on making the user interface better and fixing known problems.

But if you want you can try to write a simple specification or demo script or program that shows me how you would like to use a scripting mechanism. Maybe I will find it interesting and play around with it. You know I am a big child and JavE is one of my favorite games :-)

(Even more bizarrely, scripting support might allow you to write a presentation - like those funky Microsoft Powerpoint ones - that advanced on mouseclicks etc..)

A presentation in ASCII-Art? This sure would be funny :-)

Ok, I will now do something for work and afterwards try to fix some problems with the new release. I will contact you as soon as there is a beta version available.

Regards,
Markus