QWERTY Pulp: soft launch, android woes, editor redesign

Lots of updates since my last post -- I'm not a great blog maintainer.

iOS LAUNCH

The iOS app is OUT! Very exciting stuff, something like 19+ downloads.

So far I've only made cryptic posts on instagram and sent a few links to friends and family. Once the kinks are worked out and I've roped in another artist or two, I might try to start promoting it properly. But for now, why drive up my AWS bill?

screenshot of the most recent version of the QWERTY Pulp app screenshot of the iOS landing page for QWERTY Pulp

Android Woes

I love writing Kotlin -- especially if I've just been banging my head against some swifty iOS design pattern. But I have to say, the iOS app flies, and when I loaded to same content into the Android app, it stuttered and occasionally crashed.

Anyway, a light refactor and using a dedicated Canvas element (rather than just animating a bunch of views) seems to have solved the issue. At this writing the Android app is about 90% complete.

The Editor

There is a screenshot of the editor in the first post. It's pretty basic -- a huge amount of input elements and a timeline that is not particularly helpful.

I spent a few weeks rethinking the main controls of the editor. In that time, I was introduced to aseprite, which is one of the coolest programs I've ever encountered. The killer feature for me is the hybrid timeline/layer view. I started thinking about how my app could pack different controls into a graph, and came up with the following.

screenshot of the most recent editor prototype screenshot of the most recent editor prototype

Essentially we have assets (images, anything renderable) across the x-axis, acts (animation behaviors) across the y-axis, and an "X" where an act acts on an asset. And then behind the grid is a timeline of how long each act is active for over how long the panel is on the screen.

I'm still in the middle of hacking it together, but the basic functionality is there, and the amount of inputs onscreen simultaneously has been dramatically reduced.

next steps

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