It's been quite a while since I last made a news post, let alone since I talked about HitShaper! So I'm still working on it (almost 5 and a half years since I first started it) but it's been nice watching it grow. The main stuff that's been added since 2016 (when I first finished theming support) was support for extensions in SWF files. There was a brief phase where I was using Workers to offload extensions to different threads, but that got too unwieldy to manage!
Then, I switched over to using a shared database that could be accessed by sessions; this seemed like an almost-perfect solution (except for synchronization) since databases are asynchronous by default, and easy to share using transactions. Now, the user can add any "import/export" extension, which can handle importing and exporting to any file format - as long as the extension uses the database to do it!
I finally finished collapsible panels! This took quite some time to finish, but the result really looks a lot more like modern IDEs like FlashDevelop, PyCharm, Eclipse and the like. Take a look at the video below!
Apart from bug fixes, the main thing I'm excited to have in the pipelines is first-class extension support! I plan to allow for users to add their own (swf-based) extensions, which means that they can have any panel in their workflow, as long as it adheres to the extension API!
In effect, it's like Flash CC's extensions toolbar - imagine a Kuler-like color panel, or a "frame editor" panel, or even a "face detector" panel which autogenerates hitboxes based on the face / body / other features it can detect within an image - if it's made as an extension, then it'll be supported! Especially due to AIR's NativeProcess API, it's very possible to, say, have such a panel which communicates with a facial detection binary, and returns results back to the user. The possibilities are huge!
But that's all still in the future. For now, grad school is making me a bit busier than usual, so while such things are in the works, they may or may not be done quickly...let's hope! In the meantime, here's the "first look" for many of you:
Belthagor
What does this program do for animation, exactly??
Gimmick
Nothing for animation per se, although you can export GIFs if you want. It's mainly to let an artist / designer mark which regions are supposed to be collidable in a spritesheet, so that it can be easily parsed in a game engine or something. Basically convert a rectangle or shape on the screen into a bunch of coordinates indicating its position and size.