Amino and Leonardo: Next Steps
Another month has gone by with no update to Leonardo, or a real release of Amino. It's interesting how life changes. When I started this projects last summer I had no idea Jen and I would be having a baby in a month, nor did I truly have any notion how much my life would change. Everyone always says having children will change your life, but you never really understand it until you do it yourself, and our journey has just begun.
So, the upshot of all this rambling is that kids take time, and when you have to distribute a finite resource between multiple buckets, something has to get less. Sadly this time the short straw goes to my open source projects. It doesn't mean I won't work on them anymore, just at a slower pace. However, in order to feel at peace with myself I need to leave them in a state where they can still progress without my large time commitment. That's what this post is about.
I've spent the last year working on two main open source projects called Leonardo and Amino. Quick recap: Amino is a scene graph library for Java and JavaScript. Leonardo is a vector drawing program built on top of Amino. I want to get them both to a state where they are stable, useful, and can live on their own. Hopefully more of my job will be driving the community and integrating patches rather than directly coding everything. Every project reaches a point where it should stop being driven by a singular vision, and instead be driven by needs of actual users (the good projects anyway). Now is the that time. Time to focus on gaining adoption, growing a community, and making these projects rock-freaking-solid.
Concrete Plans
Amino
Amino basically works. Shapes are animated and drawn on screen, input events are properly transformed, and it's got pixel effects on both the Java and JavaScript sides. Speed, efficiency and features driven by actual use.
Amino finally has it's own website at GoAmino.org and I've set up auto-builds for both the Java and JavaScript versions. They also have a redesigned API doc template that you can see here. Last steps before a 1.0 release: bug fixes for Mobile Safari and FireFox, more demos, and a tutorial for integrating with Swing apps. (Oh, and if someone has a nice spring easing function, that would be swell). Target: next weekend.
Leonardo
It's basically done. It lets you draw vector art of shapes, images, and paths; and also create attractive presentations (which is just multiple pages of vector art). Now comes polish and adoption and export features. I suspect the value will really be in the export features so I need to know from you guys: what do you want?
In concrete terms I have a bunch of old bugs to fix and will finish the redesigned fill picker (colors, swatches, gradients, patterns, etc.) I also need your help updating the translations. Once that's done I'll clean up the website and cut a 1.0 release. Target: end of April.
Next Steps
In short, a lot of work for the next few weeks, but with luck (and hopefully some great feedback from you) , both Amino and Leonardo will be just fine.