Hey hey everyone! I'm not dead. Unfortunatelly had to take some contract jobs to support the development of this thing so progress has been very slow. But now I'm starting to feel like I'm back.

We (me and our designer, Vova) had some first public showing of Cascade. We visited a local Google-sponsored trade show just to see what's going on with the dev community here. It was really fun to explain that "no, this is not a cloud/js/subsription-model-payment project".

Anyways. You all (and me too) are waiting for updates on actual development.
Most recent thing I dis was the scale tool.
It's almost funny how bad tools are in many modern editors. For instance - to scale something you usually have to aim the cursor into a 10x10px scale handele, which is nuts. Or - if a tool is universal and does both scale and move operations - you can miss the scale handle by 1 px and move the object insead of scaling. This all makes it almost impossible to work fast.

What we did is a hotkey-activated set of tools. Each tool does only what it's supposed to.
So for scale tool - we split the entire screen into large zones that activate the scale hanldes, so you can work with 1px-thin slivers like that:


The tool switching is super fast and becomes intuitive very quickly. Plus the tool always behaves the same. It's function does not require precision or advanced motor skills. You just scale stuff.

So that's that. Our designer is working on html-tree and css rules representation. This is top-mega-secret WIP screenshot. (Ironically, made in Figma - a somewhat crappy cloud-based design tool. But it's still better for UI design then, say, Photoshop.)


And yes. What does mr. Bruce Lee have to do with a UI editor?

This is out big thing - we've drawn Bruce (with simple shapes). And you can actually export him as html. So a bunch of valid-html divs, that look like Bruce Lee is pretty cool. He's also been a good test case for all the features that are needed to draw him.We'll work on that some more and later, animate him with js (make even with IK, who knows) and Bruce will live on our promo page as a demonstation of 'endless possibilities' :)

Bruce Lee, Ladies and gentlemen!



And here's him in chrome. All styles are inline by default. So the code looks a bit messy.
And please nevermind the decapitation. Some simple bug somewhere... need to fix that. But I really want to make a post, so you get to see the failures as well. Not just bragging!



That's it for now.

Dont worry, next post will be soon. I already started writing it. it will be more about programming and some cool implementation details! Until next time.

And here's a piece of what I call debug art. Some multiple object rotation debugging.