Thanks for your additional thoughts. A lot of tools like After Effects don't need to deal with many of the additional complexities of hype documents, including:
What to do when on an alternate timeline
Making new layouts where offsetting is a common workflow for a while
While using 'null objects' no doubt becomes muscle memory after a while, it is most definitely not an intuitive solution for offsetting. Many users coming into Hype (especially Standard edition) have never animated before. Once you get the fairly universal concept of keyframes, one could intuit that you can return to a keyframe to modify that position, use the add keyframe/record to make new keyframes, and then simply discover what dragging otherwise does. Dragging as offset at least looks pretty clear since the motion path indicator drags with the object. The goal would always be to never hide common operations.
There's definitely deficiencies with the current paradigm. Other options like keyframe vs offset mode would have their own frustrations as well. Hype's MO is to never do things like throw up dialogs or restrict UI access, as this is the primary way to get people to hate your software :).
At the very least I think some rough edges can be polished with:
fixing opacity-like properties as appearing to have numbers outside of their natural bounds
likewise fixing discreet values (like display on/off) to not always require 2 keyframes and just have state changes
allow choosing a base timeline when working with alternates so it is more clear where values may be coming from
Totally agree, I was just exploring the differences.
This might be big focus, but many power users would be happy to pay recurring to shift the attention and focus partly more on people using the software continuously.
Yes, but I believe the key issue is that exposing all modes simultaneously, leading to recording modes and free adjustment interfering, results in the unintended side effects, specially for professional users. I still feel that this subtle point is not fully understood, as my deliberate and intentional work has been altered by a programmatic side effect. Why has my alpha ramp, which initially ranged from 0% to 100%, suddenly shifted to 15% to 115%? That make no sense, to my animation… I wanted to fade something in. I maintain that, aside from a positional side effect for repositioning, no other side effect is really desirable, especially for beginners.
Okay I am repeating myself…
I would prefer not to see this at all. However, if it must remain, ensure that the offsets are not clipped behind the scenes, only in rendering and in the GUI. When you shift something back, you still want the original range and not to shift back clipped values (destructive).
That would be wonderful.
Haven't thought about that. I am not sure how that could be beneficial? Why can't every timeline be its thing entirely. Like a Main Timeline? At least for properties that have keyframes so we can still play multiple timelines at a time? Meaning the first value is unique to each animated property like in the Main Timeline. If you need it to originate from the Main Timeline or the current state, we have the relative timeline.
Thank you for the feedback and assumed progress towards a new release (I understand you can't comment on that) and for being receptive to the shortcomings of the animation side effects. If even a fraction of the accumulated feature requests from the last few years make it into future versions, especially in terms of extensibility I would be more than happy. There are some breaking changes I truly hope to see, such as the removal of HYPE_element_container logic, but I'm not too hopeful that will happen. Perhaps it could be a switch enabled for new projects only.
This is basically something I was looking for in Hype a "stagger" action. For example if your trying to animate the word "announcement" where you have every letter typed out on its separate layers and have one letter that's key framed you can make all the keyframes based on the initial animation, so if selecting all layers that don't have the animation then right click 'stagger' pick a layer to copy the keyframe then select offset seconds and it would automatically create the stager.
You hit it that the reason is due to initial values. Timelines are more like streams of animations. But when working with the editor, you need to decide what value you are going to display before there are any animations on a property for that timeline.
This is a good strategy . There are some cases where containers are still required though (3D transforms to get perspective consistent, which is why they are there in the first place).
Tiny request: The HypeTriggerCustomBehavior should populate element in its signature depending on its calling scope. If it is used on an element action, it should be the element the action was performed on. On a timeline, it's the scene element, etc.
I would be more than happy. There are some breaking changes I truly hope to see, such as the removal of 
. There are some cases where containers are still required though (3D transforms to get perspective consistent, which is why they are there in the first place).
: