What is the roadmap of JessyInk?

I do consider the project to be active. However, I have not had much time to spend on JessyInk lately. Currently, I am trying to find a better design for the user interface for version 2.x. I have been in discussion about different approaches with a contributor over the last few weeks. There is no roadmap or timeframe for the work on JessyInk at the moment.

Dear Hannes,

it is very encouraging that the project is moving forward, at least on the drawing board. I thought about it and have a suggestion to offer interface-wise.

JI 2.0 is an improvement on the 1.x series in that the order of effects and views is immediately visible on the canvas, without resorting to the menus. Still, entering and updating numbers is clumsy, as is made evident by the recently submitted python script to perform renumbering. I thus suggest to use geometric relationships to compute precedence order. The location of an object is, presumably, available to JI at any time. Then, if the current approach of grouping objects with 'operations' (effects, views) is to be maintained, these operations can be simply organized somewhere outside the page in a way that reflects the progression in time. Either the X axis or the Y axis could be representative of time and the other axis would still be free as a coding dimension to represent something else.

It would be also nice if the shapes that represent operations were not too big and iconic, i.e. no need to put gradients, or text, on them. At most, they could be equipped with a text field in object properties declaring if they are a view or an effect or what else. All in all the following coding dimensions (non limitative) are available for use in an intuitive interface: X and Y axes (one of them to be linked with the discrete time in which the presentation is played), size, color, shape, and border properties. One can go very far with such a rich set of options!

I'd be interested to participate in the discussion if you decide to open it up to the community at some point.

Regards,

-á.

As a last note, as far as I understand a weakness of the grouping approach is that it does not provide an immediate visual feedback. From what I read online, the layers interface is Inkscape hijacking the SVG group feature to provide layers in a format that doesn't have them. It would then be useful in general and perhaps a not too demanding extension of inkscape to have a 'groups' dockable panel that would enumerate the groups present in one layer and let one see them separately by highlighting the corresponding rows.

This probably could re-use part of the already existing Inkscape UI infrastructure for layers.

Best wishes,

-á.