Hi there I’m Ayetach, I used to work closely with developers Oluseyi and others when initially reformulating Pencil code from Pascal’s original work. The hope we had (or at-least I did) was to construct a workflow of development alongside content creation to promote the software as new things were added or changed within Pencil, one such project was the ‘Solid State’ pilot project. I had recently been cleaning up lots of old archives and came across these design concepts that I thought you guys might enjoy. Pencil has certainly seen some changes since its undergone new management and who knows perhaps this will inspire you guys, either way enjoy what has been proposed in the past.
One of the initial improvements some of us were keen on making was unifying the toolset interface:
This concept illustrated an adjustable grayscale of the area outside of the camera’s view, this would be toggle-able so that animators would see the area of image capture when animating:
This was a conceptual (dark mode) with a completely refined toolset interface, tab-able projects/scenes & colour pallet system. This might have been among the more ambitious proposals for design changes but since we were brainstorming all kinds of things our vision had no limits in what we could put together:
A different conceptualisation more closely resembling the version we were working towards which altered the tool-set interface, a new projects window, audio tracing & timeline control interface (note the tooltip by the cursor modelled with a shortcut to tool functions and another for search functions using the spacebar):
I am the UI guy and one of the developers in the current team and although I have only made a mockup for a new timeline and updated various icons, I have been thinking about doing a mockup for the entire interface, so I appreciate you sharing these for possible inspiration
Always a pleasure, like I said its just old content from what we were putting together back in 2010-2011 so its been collecting some dust since. I look forward to seeing what you guys come up with!
@Ayetach Thank you for the throwback! it’s always great to see more Pencil / Pencil2D historical archives that can potentially help how we perceive and improve the software. While Pencil2D has certainly undergone new “management” it is still the same open-source project we all grew to enjoy and always geared towards improving the application and the quality of life of our users.
We have a friendly dev environment so if you ever feel inclined to come and help you’d be welcome with open arms, no strings attached of course. Either way any contribution is a well received contribution in our eyes and to be honest we’ll gladly receive any kind of assistance people want to offer us.
Thanks again for taking the time to visit and don’t be a stranger we are mostly active on our current discord server (which has a bidirectional link to the IRC dev channel #pencil2d )and you can find links to other community hubs here http://pencil2d.org/community cheers!
@MrStevns
I noticed that the Play feature box over the time line is now located on the right of the screen. Is it more effective that way or do you intend to relocate it to the left besides the zoom feature as it was before? I founded it to be more efficient that way.
I am starting to think that you do not understand most of my comments (LOL)
I just asked @MrStevns (since he mentioned here he is kind of in charge of the UI), the thing about the Play-feature-Box because I noticed it was moved from left, near the ZoomBox, to right. That’s all…
No need to submit any feedback, it was just a question!
@kaiko I understood your comment, didn’t mean to disrespect, but again, this is a really old thread, from two years ago. If there’s something you need to discuss regarding the interface do it in a new thread or better ask in the thread I linked, I don’t think it’s worth resurrecting an old thread that has an outdated design, at least in my opinion.
As for your specific question, Pencil2D 0.5.4 did have the playback controls to the far right of the timeline:
Taking notice of that, I presented the current thread on discord and CandyFace made a quick correction on his UI proposal (the one I linked before) where the playback controls are located in the center of that mockup and the timecode (which will be added soon) should also be right next to the playback controls as you can see below.
I am starting to think that you do not understand most of my comments (LOL)
I could say the same to you
p.s I personally don’t like the playback controls being so far away, but I think there’s a technical reason because when you resize the window horizontally until you reach the minimum width once the timeline shrinks those controls will move until the zoom is hidden in a specific way, so it seems the playback controls are “pinned” to that specific spot to allow for the zoom to be visible, but I’ll ask if we can improve that a bit meanwhile we wait for the timeline rewrite.
I’m Ayetach, I used to work closely with developers Oluseyi and others when initially reformulating Pencil code from Pascal’s original work. The hope we had (or at-least I did) was to construct a workflow of development alongside content creation to promote the software as new things were added or changed within Pencil, one such project was the ‘Solid State’ pilot project. I had recently been cleaning up lots of old archives and came across these design concepts that I thought you guys might enjoy. Pencil has certainly seen some changes since its undergone new management and who knows perhaps this will inspire you guys, either way enjoy what has been proposed in the past.
remember that the current mockup design for the timeline is found here: 
