hello everybody,
Thanks to your efforts, Synfig now have new features making it a powerful software able to compete even with proprietery software around in the animation industry.
now we have:
- bones.
- sound support.
- very useful group layer utilities.
- switch group layer.
but I guess open source projects only succeed when they attract more involved users, the more users the more developers are interested in participation, this is more effective than being a software run by active individuals.
Now we have problems may prevent new users from using synfig as their main animation tool, these problems include:
- stability: although it improved very much recently by the way, but synfig is still crashing from time to time.
- perfomance: synfig is a little bit slow even with simple tasks.
- documentation: the wiki documentation is out dated and some features are not documented at all. Tutorials are scattered here and there on youtube by different people with different techniques (the most useful ones are with the old features terminology).
(the tutorials made by Konstantin are great but I doupt if a new user would be interested in paying money for a tutorial of a software he is still discovering)
I suggest giving the prioity in the next crowd funding campaigns to improving synfig stability and performance.
I’m planning to make some documentation and video demonstrations in a separate (non-official) blog but waiting for the new stable version release.
Our short term mission needs to be “Synfig doesn’t have to be perfect, Synfig should do what it claims to do” 