Dev:Wish list

Got a great idea for a new feature, just add it here. Please add a rating of how essential this feature is to your workflow according to the following scale:

1. "Well, it might be nifty. To someone."
2. "I probably would make use this"
3. "It's not essential, but I'd really like to have this at my disposal."
4. "Synfig would be soooo much better with this change"
5. "I can't/won't use Synfig without it!"

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• Arbitrary Color Channels — The ability for the user to create any number of custom channels for various purposes.

• Autorecover History — It would be great if autorecover could also recover the associated history of a file in the event of a crash.

• Render target filetype — the ability to save as .mng [1]

• Layer Convert (4) — Convert a fill, outline, or gradient, to a fill, outline, or gradient (or layer mask?). So you could, say, duplicate a line and turn it into the background for a shape (if, say, you forgot to use the checkbox to create a layer of that type when you drew it, or the tool does not yet support it) It appears that this may be accomplished through the Convert... option for a layer's vertices, allowing you to reference another layer. However the interface for this is not yet completed. SnapSilverlight 17:04, 11 Jan 2006 (PST)

• Layer hide boolean parameter (3) — An animatable way to remove a layer from visibility and consideration in tools. And as an option, to hide the layer in the layer list while it is invisible. This crosses over functionality from the Amount Parameter, the Show/Hide checkbox in the Layers Dialog, and builds upon it as well, allowing the Layers Dialog to dynamically unclutter.

• Vector fill bucket (3) — Like the traditional bitmap fill, but this fills the area clicked out to the nearest boundary paths with a region of that area, set to the foreground color (it actually would create a new region layer).

  Alternatively, a single-duck layer object, that performs a simple bitmap fill from its (animatable) location, with its stored color value. (This second approach is similar to the behavior of one of Softimage's TOONZ[2]'s tools)

  If this is implemented, it will probably be necessary to change the existing "fill" tool's name and icon to a "color injector" (hypodermic needle / turkey injector icon) tool, as that's closer to describing what it does.

• redraw tool (4-5) — Intutive reshaping of path-based layers. See link.

• Restore Default Layout (3) — It's very difficult to put all the dialogs back where they were when you started the program, if you've closed them. In addition, with many programs, if you've done something with your window manager to take a window's position off screen, this command is sometimes the only way to bring them back.

• Alternate UI (2) — An MDI window would be nice on systems that don't support a fixed menu location (like Windows or Gnome/KDE) - or at the very least place the Canvas's context menus along the top of the Canvas window. [3]

• Flock tool (3) — To push around a 'soft-select' region of all layers, or all selected layers. Sort of like a smudge tool in a raster drawing app, or like the soft-mod tool in 3DSMax and Maya. "Flock" because this tool affects all the ducks in an area. ;)

• Riding ducks (2) — Not chocobos. The ability to link a duck from one shape to an arbitrary position on another path, without creating an extra shape duck on that path.

• Plugin API (1) — Would be nice to enable additional functionality to be added to the program without it necessarily needing to be in the Synfig source tree. (added as this is a standard request/feature for a graphics or video app)

• Python support (1) of some sort will no doubt be demanded by the userbase eventually, for studio-specific automation of tasks, noncompiled plugins, etc. I (SnapSilverlight) don't have any particular use for it at the moment, tho'.

• mod_synfig (1) — For Apache. Render .sif to some format like png/mng on access.

• synfig nsplugin (1) — Let Mozilla and Mozilla-based view synfig files in-browser.

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• Uninstall feature for OSX. — Install put 80MB of gtkmm rubbish somewhere above slash and then the app failed to run anyway because it couldn't find said rubbish. Not happy, Jan. Perhaps an install prefix for osx where folks could easily delete it?

Maybe bugreport it instead? SnapSilverlight 17:09, 11 Jan 2006 (PST)