Not a feature request, but merely an attempt to figure out what most of the people here are planning to use Hype for.
From the feature set, it’s a clearly an animation program. Everything is revolved around timelines, transitions and now also physics. If you want to do anything else, the old “do your own JS” is there, as it is with every HTML5 animation program.
From my 2d animation experience (and it’s more than 20 years, staring with MM Director, AE, Flash and now HTML5) there is very little market for the low end animation on the web outside banner ads. And I hope this program is meant for more. Whether serious game developers jump to use it or stay with their canvas and custom JS remains to be seen, since Hype doesn’t offer any graphic editing and professional animation tools like onion skinning, bezier curve editing, etc. Neither has it provisions for quick adding sprite sheets.
On the other end, there is huge and quickly growing market for rapid UI prototyping. In the last 2 years it takes more and more of my time. And what’s even more interesting is that it doesn’t have yet a visible champion. People use anything from the simplest “click-and-go” and never meant for serious interactivity tools to full featured ones like Axure.
The UI prototypers (and if there anything the history of Flash teaches us) have to be event-based, not timeline-based. It took years for Adobe to acknowledge this and create Flex. Alas, too little, too late. The second must have is code-free environment. If designers use JS as their everyday tool, they would be called programmers and would get paid accordingly. Unlike games, prototyping is a one man job. Having JS coder handy is not an option.
Axure did a great job achieving this, but it has few irreconcilable ills: it’s heavy, your file can easily grow over 100MB without any bitmaps; it’s slow (written in .NET and only recently optimized for Mac), it doesn’t support vectors, it produces spaghetti code, totally useless in the production.
So, to conclude, I’d love to switch to Hype for this, but my last few prototypes were so involved, conditions elaborate and calculations intense, I can’t see myself doing it all over in JS by hand. The good thing is that Hype supports external symbols with JS scripts. A good library of all typical UI widgets is something everybody would love.
Appreciate any thought on the topic. Sorry, if I’ve chosen the wrong forum for it.
. While we don’t have a common set of widgets yet, the Symbols feature in Hype 3.0 pro was our first step along building this.