I had a really productive work session today despite doing the LD48 this weekend. I was able to carve out around 7 hours straight working on Mood Board.
As I get closer to the “MVP” candidate that I’m hoping to release as version 1.0 I am getting more excited. In addition to the increased energy around getting closer I’m thinking about a ton of things I’d like to add before I launch.
The beta squad has been fantastic! I’m seeing at least one or two issues every day that are either me being dumb, or things I hadn’t thought of, which I suppose is really the same thing.
I think it’s critically important though to stay focused on the least amount of stuff that the app needs to do for it to feel useful. I’m doing my best with it.
Today I implemented Marquee selection. If you’d have told me that the app felt broken before 3pm today (roughly when box selection started working) I wouldn’t have believed you. Now, however, my attitude has changed. I’m not clicking single assets at all to move stuff around now; rather I’m dragging a rectangle and moving whole chunks of content. It is probably my single favorite feature.
CoreAnimation is a bit of a bear. When you implement views to support it you have to be very careful what kinds of settings you apply. A lot of transforms that you want to perform, even on things that are animated otherwise, you want to skip animations for (like changing the size of an item 300 times in a second… does that really need to be animated?)
CATransaction is a lifesaver in this regard.
Ok, that’s todays development update. Tomorrow I’m hoping to get back to some Processing sketching while I wait to see what my beta testers have to say about version 7. If you’re interested in getting on the beta list you can sign up here http://www.tinyletter.com/tingham