Quality of life suggestions

Feature Suggestions
#1

Hi, I’m a LONG-time Flash animator (since 2003 while I was still in school) who is trying to finally ditch Flash, and preferably all Adobe products and other commercial programs, and trying to go with open source tools if possible. Wick Editor came highly recommended on every website article I found listing out free alternatives to Adobe Flash Pro / Animate CC, so I downloaded the latest 1.19 desktop version (I am never going to use a program like this within a web browser, not my preference at all), and have been messing around with it trying to make a new animation project.

I’ve been pleased with how similar a lot of things are with Flash, and how quickly and easily I was able to get going with it coming from Flash. I’m also impressed overall with what the program can do and where it’s at now, for being a free open-source program and not being very old yet.

I do not expect this program to be able to compete toe-to-toe with professional software with a long history and developed by a large team of full-time developers funded by a big software company, like Adobe’s products. However, I thought it might be worth mentioning a few of the issues I have with Wick Editor that keep it from being the perfect replacement for Flash that I wanted it to be. Also, it may be that some things I’m mentioning are there but I couldn’t find them, so please inform me if that’s so.

  1. More UI customization - In Flash I’m used to being able to move each element and part of the UI to wherever I want it, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to do that here from what I can see.

  2. Ability to SAVE my changes to the UI - It annoys me how any adjustments I make to the UI, such as changing the frame size or the size of the timeline, tool settings, etc., has to be redone every time I launch the program. Maybe I missed something, but I looked all over the settings and UI for an option for this.

  3. SCENES - I usually make around 5 minute or so long animations, with several different scenes, and in Flash I always took advantage of the Scene feature to organize my project nicely, which makes it faster to jump around to where I need to go. It’d be great if Wick Editor added the ability to divide an animation up into scenes similarly. I did find a thread on this forum that suggested a workaround, where each scene is contained in a movie clip on a single frame in the main timeline, and playback script code is used to stop and play at the right times, but I’d rather not have to resort to a convoluted workaround like that and have to make use of code, plus I’m paranoid that complicating it like that will mess up the unpredictable video exporting in some way.

  4. Movie clips saved in library - In Flash when you create a new movie clip or graphic object, it was saved in the library to the side and copies could be pulled out at any time. It’s just a nice little function to have.

  5. Fill tool needs more work - Most of the time when I use the fill tool, there is a delay before it completes the fill, which can vary in length, plus it can be a bit janky with leaving some little spots behind. I understand that this is probably the most complicated tool, as the fill bucket tool was always a little bit janky in every version of Flash I used as well, and sometimes required a little clean-up work even there - though at least Flash offered more options to adjust gap filling sensitivity, which helped quite a bit.

These are just some suggestions from me, as a long-time Flash animator, and these things would really make the program more friendly for me to use on a regular basis, but I understand if you have other priorities first. It’s a very nice program overall, and I hope you continue on with it and make it even greater. I am going to continue checking regularly for updates. Also, I’m going to press on with finishing my first cartoon in this program, and I’ll post it here in case anyone cares to see what I managed to do with the program.

7 Likes
#2

You CAN save clips in wick, by pressing control E on a clip and saving it on your computer. And you can export the clip that you saved in another project. Also Welcome to the forums!!!

2 Likes
#3

Hello and Welcome to the Forums! I Hope you had a good start at Wick Editor.

You can save Clips with Control E but you Mist expect that some Features are verry hard to Resch because of the Budget but they are Open everytime for new Suggestions

1 Like
#4

These are all good suggestions. I feel you in each single point. I have also been using flash since Macromedia Flash 8. Think at this like a light, web, free, and open source flash version. It is remarkable what the team has achieved until now. It will just become better.

Welcome to the forums.

3 Likes
#5

Ah, that’s good to know about and could end up being pretty useful. Still would be nice to add them to the asset library, but that’s not really a huge deal.

1 Like
#7

Same as the OP; found Wick Editor last week on a twitter conversation about Adb replacements. Have been playing with the offline versions (I’m one of those “old school” types that doesn’t like using software in the browser, so thank you for producing desktop mounted versions…even further, THANK YOU for making it for Windows, Mac, AND Linux as I work in all three environments) and–coming from Flash (versions 3-MX2004)–my Flash + Director experience came back.

Used Lunacy and XnView to create assets and generated a quick interface with 5 buttons and was able to step through it well. Got around the whole video challenge (without sound) once it was seen that you had movie clip functionality wired up in here by taking an image sequence previously generated in Blender, duplicating the folder of PNGs, doing a batch process in XnView to change them all from 720p to 240p, and creating a 72 frame movie clip inserting each image per frame manually. Used Brackets and Chrome as suggested in the forum (will download XAMPP later). Playback @ 12 fps was awesome. Am definitely putting Wick Editor into my toolbox.

Three questions:

Does anyone know if there are any problems with using the exported HTML from Wick Editor to create a standalone presentation in Electron? It doesn’t appear that there should be…just asking.

Is there a way to launch external programs from Wick Editor (I work on Mac & Linux mostly, but most of my end users are on Windows; it would help if–in the times that I HAVE to run videos with sound–I could run/load standalone versions of VLC or MPlayer. Asking in the event that I need to build a self-contained solution. Back in 2007, I was using Macromedia Director but was being supplied videos in QuickTime. Since our IT department did not want to pay for the licenses for the QuickTime Player, I got around it by using .BAT files to command the MOV files to play in MPlayer successfully which were called from a mouseUp command in the Director projector.

Are there any roadblocks to importing assets (PNG/SVG) and/or text into runtimes dynamically (used to do this all the time in Flash with XML)?

THANK YOU for this excellent tool.

#8

I have done it without any problems in macos.

#9

This is not possible due to limitations of the web: starting a external program is a no go.
You can, I think, embedd movies etc if you want to. Wick gives you a html-environment in which you can do practically anything you can on the normal web, so that could be a posibillity.
I’ve not tried it, though…

You can download and use anything you want. Search the forums for ajax-importing code, and you can see that people import JS, but images as well.

welcome!

Paul

#10

Thank you for getting back to me so quickly. From what I’d learned thus far about the HTML files produced by Wick Editor, it didn’t seem like there should be a problem.

#11

Thank you for answering so quickly. I wondered about this but figured that it may have to be something that I could possibly be activated in electron through Chromium. I have used Tumult Hype on a mac and Google Web Designer on Linux in conjunction with Electron and gotten some nice constructs.