Re: interface for creating SVG animations in Inkscape

Hi,

I use SVG animation for a web comic (I haven't worked on it for some time but intend to get back to it). This has a lot of interactivity. Therefore I think your interface should allow event detection and responses to events as well as just time-lines. I mostly use JavaScript for my animation and interactivity but use SMIL when I want something to change gradually. The SMIL is usually trigured by JavaScript and often initiates a JavaScript funtion or another SMIL animation when it ends. I haven't really tryed CSS because it isn't supported by ASV but that probably isn't important now. Also I often need to have one object receive an event and trigure an animation on another and there didn't seem to be a way to do that with CSS.

Richard Pearman       http://www.pixelpalaces.com/
The next stage in the evolution of web comics: http://www.pixelpalaces.com/dk/
South Alberta Cactus and succulent society: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=20360241008


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: [email protected] 
  To: [email protected] 
  Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2014 3:08 PM
  Subject: [svg-developers] interface for creating SVG animations in Inkscape


    
  Hello everyone,

  I hope I am in the right community to post this :). I needed to find people who work with SVG and web design.

  This is my first post here and I already have a favour to ask. This semester, me and my other two collegues are working on a project for a class called "User Interface Design" and one of my collegues had a wonderful idea for the project - to design an interface for creating SVG animations in Inkscape (without the use of scripts though). These days, we are trying to find people, ask them certain questions and analyze their requirements. And because I live in the Czech republic and there are barely any people working with SVG, I decided to post this in this community.
  So here are my questions I came up with and I would be happy if you had time to answer them. The questions were meant to be aimed at web designers (but only the first question is about designing web pages though) but anyone is welcome to answer. And if you choose to answer these questions, please state what would you use them for (web design, motion design, presentations, etc.). If you dont know anything about SVG animations, you can always read the specification :D (http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/animate.html) or you can just give answers based on other types of animations that you know. I hope the question as well as all other things I am writing are understandable since english is not my mother tongue.


  * What would you use the animations for when designing web pages?
  * Which aspects of svg animations (attributes, types of animation, events,...) do you find to be the most important? Which of those should be easily reachable in the interface?
  * Which aspects are in your opinion not very frequently used?
  * How do you think the animations without an absolutely given interval (animations started by events or those started relativly to the beginning/end of another animation) should be displayed on the timeline?
  * How would you like the tools for creating animations to be laid out in the interface (how many windows, where, what tools,...)?
  * Would you prefer working with the animations directly through interaction with the timeline or using tools outside the timeline (changing the length of the animation,adding a keyTime,...)?
  * Would you like to have an option to save the animations you used on an element to be able to reuse them in different project or on different element in the same project? That way you could create for example a certain motion, name it and apply it to other elements in the same/different project. This is just an idea of mine and I am not sure to what extent this would be useful.

  So these are all the questions I came up with. I would appreciate any other ideas or suggestion you might have.

  Thank you for your time.

  John