Movie Explorer for Hype

[lovetobuildstuff (James Lake)]

I’d like to chime in with my add for the Hype wish list. One thing I’m noticing especially when working with complex Hype files is I get into a pattern of searching for various things such as multiple timelines, JS in the document head, frame actions, scene actions, as well as symbols and any code called within those instances.

Basically trying to figure out at a glance, what’s going on in a given project. It would be a huge help to have a panel like an explorer window - showing scenes, timelines, symbol instances, actions, behaviors, etc.

I know that information is there in the data.plist XML - and I’ve used various regular expressions to search for various things and to find what I need. Maybe this could be a feature for a future release?

[jonathan (Jonathan Deutsch)]

I did not know about the Movie Explorer tool in Flash, very cool request!

Navigating a complex Hype project is definitely a UI problem. I have wanted to add a better scene connection/flow view; it might make sense to combine some of the ideas from the movie explorer for that. (Also I notice that has a find panel - a global search is definitely something Hype needs too).

[lovetobuildstuff (James Lake)]

@jonathan and for users like myself with the attention span of a fruit fly, it’s really a vital tool

[Ed_Sager]

a find panel - a global search is definitely something Hype needs too

Yes, @jonathan, definitely

Text find /replace function for inner html

Referring to the preliminary discussion about this topic started by @Carola_Clavo: the Feature Request would be to extend already existing ‘Text Find / Replace’ -function for quick text search/replace onto elements inner html across all scenes/layouts of a multi-scene hype document. It would be a great time-saver in localization projects when you need to replace e.g. the US-Dollar sign with Euro-sign 20+ times in the same document ! For now only source code editing area (Head HTML tab) …

[Photics]

Navigating a complex Hype project is definitely a UI problem. I have wanted to add a better scene connection/flow view

I was wondering if this was one of the things the community could build. Wouldn’t it just be a matter of using JavaScript to scan the elements in the project, then displaying them nicely?

Unfortunately…

…while there are unique class names for scenes and elements, the IDs are not really helpful. There’s no reference to the human friendly names used in Hype.

First, scene names should be unique. I never really liked the idea that two or more scenes could have the same name.

Then, perhaps Hype could use Data Attributes for Scene and Element names. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41361238/how-to-target-element-by-data-attribute-using-javascript

One could be… data-hype-scene=“Untitled Scene”… and another could be… data-hype-element=“Text”

Data Attributes have been mentioned before…

• Add Missing Element Attributes – Especially the data-* Attribute

…and before that…

• Data attribute support

…I was thinking that Data Attributes should be something that the developer/desiger adds when working on a Hype project. But, if Hype standardized the naming for Scenes and Elements… it could be another way to control the project – even generating a list of project elements.

[jonathan (Jonathan Deutsch)]

An interesting thought, but I don’t think you’ll be able to work backwards from an export – exports lose a lot of information not the least of which is display names (also symbols, persistent symbol placement, resources and resource utilization, etc.). Also on the ID front they have to be unique in the entire HTML page, which means even if you assign a “nice” ID to an element, it isn’t guaranteed of actually having that ID (hence hypeDocument.getElementByID which uses internal lookup tables to ensure proper mapping per exported animation).

It would be better to A) just implement this in Hype or B) provide a plugin/applescript support that can walk Hype’s document structure.

Regardless being able to set additional HTML attributes/data attributes might be seen sooner than you think .