Things is a Retained-Mode Canvas Animation API; intended for Gnu/Linux.

I wanted an API to express animation and the 'thing-iness' of objects as directly as I could imagine. With Things, it's very easy to create visual metaphors.

It's written in Python and uses Python-Cairo as its engine. (I hope to raise enough interest to get this re-written in C because it's pretty slow in Python.)

The basic idea is that Things can contain other Things, and that they are animated by key frames and tweens -- described in a simple string 'language'.
Various specialized Things are available to do stuff like clipping, hit-detection and so on.

To manage "media" content, there is a Bag-Of-Stuff module which:
1. Loads animations and paths from SVG files.
2. Installs fonts (otf, ttf) temporarily.
3. Loads images.

The addition of the BagOfStuff means that graphics can be designed in Inkscape -- these can then be directly used in Python code via the API. This really helps as Inkscape becomes a kind of 'distributed' IDE for animation.

There is also a BoxOfTricks module that: draws fast text, curved boxes (of any shape) and other handy things.

Please see the demos; named *.thingum.py

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2009


