Konstantin's weekly report #48

Hello everyone!

This weekly report is kindly sponsored by Daif and today I am going to share the last results of our work on improving Synfig UI.

Let me start with a demonstration video:

In short:

  • By now the Gtk3 port is pretty much usable. The only significant regression - keyframe markers are missing on the timetrack, which makes impossible their dragging. Ivan is working on resolving this now.
  • Toolbox now can be resized to smaller size. Interpolation widget moved to the canvas window.
  • Global toolbar (the one under menu) merged into canvas window toolbar. Tollbar now nicely hides buttons if there are not enough space.
  • Timeline removed from canvas window. We do have another timeline in Timetrack Panel, so why have both? Still, you can get it back by pressing a special toggle button.
  • Reorganized buttons in canvas window.
  • Statusbar was removed. It’s widgets were distributed to other toolbars.

synfig-gtk3-4-video.png
In general, you might notice most of those improvements are targeted for saving the UI horizontal space. There are still too much of space occupied by the rulers, but I hope we will get that fixed soon.


Finally, some words about the funding situation. As you probably remember, my decision was to go without fundraising campaign for July, and try to cover the payments for our hired developer (Ivan Mahonin) from the collected donations, training package sales and my personal resources.

So, today, I am happy to announce that we have enough funds to extend the period of Ivan’s dedication up to 15th July. In fact, within our current resources it was possible to hire Ivan for even longer period, but in this month we have to make the annual webhosting payments, which eats a part of our budget.

So, this month Ivan works till 15th of July and after that he goes to (deserved) vacation. Right now I am not ready to announce any plans for August yet, let’s see what we can achieve during this month. Again, I would like to thank all people who supported our past fundraising campaigns and keep supporting us with donations and subscriptions. We appreciate that a lot!

Thank you!

I strongly recommend to keep global toolbar, and don’t move those documents command tools(save, new, open, etc…) to canvas toolbar. If we have to remove global toolbar, I advice to just remove it, and don’t add documents command tools to canvas window. And I don’t think it is a good choice to have status related tools separately locating in different toolbars to save horizontal space.

Onion Skin and display quality buttons are removed from canvas toolbar, are there plan to bring them back?

I have an idea for how Synfig can make money during Ivan’s break Synfig Open Film