Josh On Design

Amino 1.1 is on it's way, and despite the small version number difference the changes will be big. We are dropping Java support and heavily refactoring the JavaScript version.

First things first. I'm dropping support for Java. I have gotten essentially no downloads or feature requests for the Java version of Amino which tells me that almost no one is using it. If you want to do desktop Java graphics then I suggest moving to JavaFX. It is well supported and received many excellent updates in the past six months; and it's open source now. If I had known JavaFX was going to reboot with a pure Java version with great hardware acceleration then I probably wouldn't have started Amino to begin with. Leo itself will stay on the older version of Amino until I can get it ported, but no new features will go into the Java port. I highly suggest you check out JavaFX 2.1, now in beta. It even has WebKit integration.

Second, I have done a big refactor to the JavaScript port. The API will change only slightly. The big changes are under the hood in the way it handles animation and multiple canvases (canvii?). Now you can have a single core Amino engine per page that supports multiple canvases. They will all repaint quickly with minimal tearing while being as efficient as possible. This is a must on mobile devices, and in ebooks where multiple canvases per page are common.

Other stuff of note:

• Bitmap Text: support the custom styled font output of Leonardo Sketch using dynamic bitmap sprites.
• Animate DOM elements as well as shapes on the canvas.
• Improvements to the animation api to support chaining, parallel animations, callbacks, and before/after actions.
• Split into three files: core, shapes, and bitmap effects. Now you can do cool animation without including the scripts you don't need.
• New API documentation.
• Simple integration with Three.js for 3D objects with 2D canvas
• Touch events for mobile devices.

Not everything is in the beta build yet, but it will be coming soon. Please try it out and give me feedback.