July 27, 2026

We will need to support layers? Layers can help separating line art, colors, characters, backgrounds. It becomes easier to manipulate the art with layers. Layers go top to bottom, while we need frames which are made up of layers. Frames go from left to right. An animation can have 2 to M frames and each frame could have 1 to N layers. Total pictures in an animation can be M x N, in a simple case there could be one layer per frame and that makes the number of pictures 1 x N or N pictures.

July 26, 2026

July 25, 2026

July 24, 2026

July 23, 2026

July 22, 2026

July 21, 2026

July 20, 2026

July 19, 2026

July 18, 2026

July 17, 2026

I commented out the Draw, Color and Replay tab views, now the app only has one view and that is Animate. That's the focus of the app.


        
          TabView {
           /* DrawView()
                .tabItem { Label("Draw", systemImage: "pencil.tip") }
            
            ColoringPageView()
                .tabItem { Label("Color", systemImage: "paintpalette") }*/
            
            AnimateView()
                .tabItem { Label("Animate", systemImage: "film") }
            
        /*    ReplayView()
                .tabItem { Label("Replay", systemImage: "play.circle") }*/
        }

July 16, 2026

July 15, 2026

Today I ...

July 14, 2026

July 13, 2026

Nothing crazy today but I felt the animate view had color selector which was taking too much real estate, so I removed the preview box, color picker shows which color was selected in a small circle, we don't need another rounded rectangle that is 100x100 to preview. So here is the code I commented out.


        
          // Preview rectangle using the chosen color
          /* RoundedRectangle(cornerRadius: 10)
                    .fill(selectedColor)
                    .frame(width: 100, height: 100) */

July 12, 2026

July 11, 2026

July 10, 2026

July 9, 2026

What am I building today? My simple anime app now allows drawing in frames, coloring them and animating the frames as well exporting the animation as a GIF file. That's it, that is the whole product. Now it is about making each of the pieces of the app better, offer more flexibility like reordering frames, better control over your drawing like finer lines, textures etc, simplifying color selection, mixing.

July 8, 2026

I just completed reading a book The Animator's Workbook by Tony White. It was published 40 years ago but many of the concepts of animation described in the book still hold true. It was interesting however to see how many of those manual aspects like peg boards, cel animation, cel painting, recording video of the cels and so on may not be needed because they can be done better, more efficiently and easily with digital tools. It makes me wonder if digital tools that replaced some of these aspects were looked down up on 40 years ago similar to the reaction to AI tools of today. I believe AI, software, CGI, brushes, prepacked paint tubes, stretched canvas every one of these tools is just what it is, a tool to help make art. Of course it is easy to confuse these tools as an end rather than a means to a wonderful piece of art. AI is considered to be a different kind of tool because it can create unlike the other tools that cannot create. Can AI create by itself? Or does it need a human to direct, guide, edit? As of today, AI cannot create anything by itself, it needs to be prompted and told what to create. The question I'm thinking of is, can AI replace a Hayao Miyazak or a Moebius? Can it come up with stories, drawing, character design, movement, like these great artists of our day have done and are continuing to do.

July 7, 2026

My animation app view was not scrolling up and down and I had few controls towards the bottom of the screen which were hidden under the menu bar, since I could not scroll up or down, I wasn't able to use any of the controls like erase, exporting to a GIF file, setting frame rate of the animation etc that were hidden behind the menu bar. Initially when I asked Curson to fix it, it went ahead and fixed it but then I reverted that code by accident. When I asked Cursor to insert that code back, it said I am out of tokens :) and asked to upgrade to a paid plan. Token costs are reallllllll .... I did some googling and found a simple solution to the problem, wrap my view content into a ScrollView, which did the trick, now I can scroll the view. I spent 30 minutes trying to figure this out, Google for solution, watched a YouTube video. Would Cursor have fixed this in shorter time, of course, it actually did which took less than 1 minute so, is Cursor useful? It is but then I didn't know what it fixed and how it made the view scrollable, I would have to interpret the generated code to understand what the problem was and the solution....but then this is a simple example, what if the problem was bigger and Cursor added a ton of lines of code, how would I even go about understanding all of that.....you mighy say why do you care to understand, just let it do its thing and you worry about the output, does it help you achieve the outcome you need faster? Coming from programming background where you wrote every single line of code (hate to admit it, I don't like autocompletion or development frameworks for the same reason I don't like not knowing every line of code), perhaps the times they are a chaning and old must make way for the new and the new is vibe coding.... Timing and spacing are keys to animation. Timing is the duration of the animation, spacing is the distance between the frames.

Is creating animation laborious, time consuming and costly? The answer seems to be yes, take for example the cost of a 3D animation movie like Minions and Monsters, it took over two years, hundreds of people and $85 million dollars to make, Netflix's K-Pop Demon Hunters took 6 years and $100 million dollars to make. In 2D animation, the oscar winning movie The Boy and the Heron took 4 years and $55 million to make. Is there a better way without compromising quality? Can AI help in areas of mundane, boring, repetitive tasks of making animation? The answer is yes.