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Comment by rawnlq | Hacker News Reader

The animation timeline controls used in these tutorials[1] are better than the ones used for by professional web developers[2].

[1] https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/pixar/animate/ba... [2] https://greensock.com/timelinemax

I wish web devs would stop reinventing the wheel and just steal these UIs from animation software that are proven to work well for animators.

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Uh, one is an editor UI, the other is an API. They're not exactly comparable.

There are tools to go between the two (from http://cubic-bezier.com/ to Flash's HTML5 export), but I don't think there's any general solution to go from a UI like that, to code. What if one of your points is a programmatic parameter that varies over time? What if you're changing ground level with every iteration? How does the bezier-based editing UI help with that?

> What if one of your points is a programmatic parameter that varies over time? What if you're changing ground level with every iteration? How does the bezier-based editing UI help with that?

Check out how After Effects solves this, keyframed and scripted animation shares the same timeline and can reference each other.

> just steal these UIs

Look and feel may not be copyrightable but this would make a lot of people very uncomfortable in terms of possible liability (UI's can be covered under design patents, etc).

love how I'm being downvoted for pointing out a very real legal risk for software projects that attempt what was suggested.

Keep on being terribly naive about legal matters HN, never change.

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