

Automatoon: A HTML5 animation service on GAE written in clojure - zitterbewegung
http://www.automatoon.com/

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drcode
I'm a founder and the technical lead- feel free to ask me questions!

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andresmh
I'm one of the people behind Scratch
<[http://scratch.mit.edu>](http://scratch.mit.edu>); and I can tell you that
Automatoon is seriously cool. I can already see a lot of our users would like
your tool. Kudos to you for empowering amateur users!

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drcode
yeah, definitely kindrid spirts, app-wise! Thanks for the kind words on
automatoon!

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andresmh
I am a bit confused about the pricing model. Why did you decide to charge per
creation rather than per month? Who is the expected audience? Again, great
tool.

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drcode
Most of our audience is just people who play with it because its fun and
tweet/email it to friends. This is how we hope to get publicity. Our secondary
audience is web developers who need just a little bit of animation for a site
and don't want to lose weeks becoming proficient in Flash/ToonBoom and paying
for all the pricey authoring tools. We hope the second category can expense
the premium cost for their projects to clients and won't mind paying a
reasonable per-project price.

However, we're certainly open to other pricing models... We just figure since
the "iPhone App" era people are more comfortable paying one-time fees instead
of signing up to a renewing prescription.

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andresmh
I see, but the iPhone apps people often pay for tools they can use to create
multiple artifacts. Maybe it'd be best to charge less per creation (like $1)
and remove more features from the free one (e.g. animations could expire in 1
day and can't be downloaded).

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drcode
The reason we don't want to "cripple" the free version is because we have low
overhead and can afford to make low revenue at the outset- We'd rather focus
on capturing a larger market (though it's always hard to say what the market
really is with a new product)

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rincewind
I miss the "made with alien technology" badge on this site. Otherwise awesome
work, drcode.

Edit: it needs a way to make parts or joints fixed when bending, so I can't
turn my train upside down when I rotate a wheel.

~~~
drcode
Agreed- That enhancement is coming in the next point release. (the one about
the train wheels :-)

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funcall
Very cool indeed.

One minor issue was that the animation seemed to be running even when I
switched back to the Draw or Animate tabs, pegging the CPU.

Didn't see any reference to Clojure on the site, reference?

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zitterbewegung
Clojure mailing list post.
[http://groups.google.com/group/compojure/browse_thread/threa...](http://groups.google.com/group/compojure/browse_thread/thread/f6c3f45da106616a?hl=en)

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funcall
Indeed, how did I miss that. Thanks.

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tolmasky
I have an Apple 27 inch cinema display, and with my browser window more or
less full screen the animations seem pretty broken (they were fine after I
made my browser window smaller and refreshed) -> <http://imgur.com/zdrYk>

Also, if it helps: running Safari 5.0.5

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hollerith
Title should say "animation service" or "animation editor", not "automation
service".

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Tichy
Too bad that the video is in Flash.

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drcode
You're right, youtube supports HTML5 video, doesn't it? I'll have to switch
over the player so that people don't think the references to flash in the
source are from my animation :-)

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tluyben2
very nice! compliments!

