Since my last post I have done a lot of work on the UI framework. Below is screen dump of how it currently looks:
As you can see I have borrowed the main theme from Google Chrome e.g. where each open file is a tab and it’s possible to drag and drop tabs in and out of xade.
In my last post a lot of what xade is going to be was in flux. Since then I have nailed down some of issues:
1. I will make a painting/sketching application first as opposed to doing the voxel sculpting application. The primary reason behind this is minimizing risk. I guesstimate that a painting application only will take half the time compared to the sculpting application and at least 50% of the code from the painting application can be reused in the sculpting application.
2. The name Xade will be used as an umbrella name for my future company and my current idea is to name the individual products after renaissance artists (or the Turtles) like Xade Leonardo and Xade Michelangelo.
3. Even though Xade won’t be able to edit all 3D asset types it should still be able to display a whole host of file formats like all the major image and mesh formats.
4. I will focus on a minimalistic UI and the most important measure of the application is how good it feels to work with as opposed to the quantity of features.
Going up against Photoshop with a painting application might seem like complete suicide but the more I think about it, it feels like the right thing to do. In a future post I will talk about what I have in mind…