A cross-platform, native program would have easily cost us an extra 2000 working hours, and the gains would have been minimal. However, Expressive Animator is a free and open-source program, and you can always contribute, either with code or with money. Cheers!
Assembler CSS is built on top of Constructable Stylesheets because we believe there is value in this technology. If you haven't heard about constructable stylesheets, here is a link https://dev.to/westbrook/why-would-anyone-use-constructible-... to a short article. If interested, you can find many more with a simple search on Google. When people read about constructable stylesheets, they are like, "Wait, whaaaaat? Constructable Stylesheets is about using JavaScript to generate CSS?". Yeah, dude, welcome to the 21st century! Try not to make a heart attack over this.
Using Javascript on the back-end to build stylesheets based on tags actually used might make some sense, but client side? That's just dumb. There's so many ways that can go wrong.
Hi, everybody! Full disclaimer: I'm one of the developers behind Expressive Suite. Thank you all for your feedback; it has been beneficial. The first thing I want to address is the browser support. Sadly, Firefox and Safari do not support many of the features that most Chromium-based browsers do. There are a thousand different things that make an application feel like an application: access to the file system, access to local fonts, unrestricted access to the clipboard, etc. Without these features, it is hard to create something great. When Firefox and Safari add support for all of these, we'll gladly support them too. About the features (or the lack of them): what you see is the first pre-release of the software. We'll release a new version every week until the software matures. Unfortunately, Github does not allow us to set milestones at the organization level, so you'll need to watch the other repositories too.
https://github.com/ExpressiveSuite/CanvasEngine/milestones
One more thing: we will support video exports somewhere in September. Why September? Because that's when WebCodecs will be available in Chromium-based browsers. I hope this helps.
Don’t let the negative comments about browser compatibility get you down. These are perfectly reasonable issues, and it’s really hard making something this full featured fully cross-compatible.
While ideally there are graceful degradations for challenging browser feature situations, prioritizing getting this out into the world is fine, and the hacker news audience is definitely not representative.
You are getting the blame for the general situation of uneven advanced browser feature implementations, when that should be constructively turned elsewhere.
Access to the file system, the clipboard etc. is a serious security risk. You are committed to supporting deliberately insecure browsers instead of good ones, because the latter are limiting: a worrying backwards attitude towards users.
By the way, what are the benefits that made you choose a web app instead of a proper native application?
