Hi!
I just began using Hype about a month ago and am very, very grateful for it! I’ve moved to it from Adobe Edge Animate because of Adobe’s discontinuing support for EA.
My specific use case for using EA and now Hype is for developing IAB standard display Ad Units. Historically (up to a year ago), these had been developed in Adobe Flash until the world had finally had enough of Flash… lol. The can still be created in Adobe Animate CC (the replacement for Flash) but the element is lacking in many ways when it comes to interactivity via JS and accessibility.
Bearing my use case in mind, I found this issue because I need to be able to duplicate projects as well. You see, the creative I work with is mostly the same (99% of the time) across the various ad unit sizes (e.g. 160x600px or 300x250px, etc). Though the stage sizes change between units, the creative is almost always the same and makes use of the same extracted image assets - which I store outside of the project directory to reduce file duplication - I should also mention, I use Git to version control my projects.
What I usually do is start with the largest unit size (e.g. Wide Skyscraper or 160x600) and then duplicate the first ad unit’s project folder to begin working on the next ad size. The images that I extract from the original creative (*.svg files, *.png files, etc.) do not need to be re-sized and/or re-extracted from the original creative (an *.ai or *.psd file) - most of them are the same across all unit sizes. After duplicating the first ad unit’s folder, I just change the variables in the Hype project like the stage size and then re-position elements as needed across the timeline.
So, with all the above in mind, I can tell you that it’s a massive pain to re-link files. Edge Animate used to store references to external assets as relative paths if they were located in the same Volume (in Windows terms, the same drive). I dug into the “*.hype” file/directory and can even point out exactly how Hype is tracking the original assets - it’s in the PROJECT_DIR/project.hype/data.plist file. The individual images are watched using the full absolute path under the key, “originalPath”. I’m guessing that path is what Hype is passing to its file watcher.
Could we make it possible to specify relative paths to the linked original files? For example, my project’s file structure looks like this:
- project-wrapper-dir
- assets-dir
- 160x600-images
- 300x250-images
- svgs
- fonts
- project-dir
- project.hype
- project.hyperesources
- css-dir
- js-dir
It would be great if the “originalPath” key could look like, “…/assets/svgs/somesvg.svg” instead of “/Volumes/work/imedias/project-wrapper-dir/assets-dir/svgs/somesvg.svg”.
Implementing relative paths (when needed) would be just such a very, very big life saver! It would allow a Hype user to re-purpose projects on the fly with references to external files and thus, would reduce clutter and local file storage.
In the interim, what I do is run a text search and replace for the absolute path to point it to another on data.plist and that seems to get things working.
Oh, btw, in order to gain access to the “data.plist” file (in case you’d like to try the same), you can open the “project.hype” file in Finder using the “Go to Folder” option under “Go”. Just type in the full path ending with the “*.hype” file name and Finder will open it as a folder. You’ll see the data.plist file there.
Hope this helps and thanks once again Tumult team!