Hello! This is more of a "I'm not dead post". Just a couple updates.

The engine re-write is in progress. I'm sill working just on the flex-box spec implementation. This is the first time ever that i've actually hit a capacity limit of my mind. I just cant keep all the spec in the brain-RAM or whatever it is. The spec itself is not that difficult. It's short. The implementation is less than 1000 loc. But omg, the nomenculature is making things hard. It's actually turned out to be a serious problem for me. Everything has to be triple-checked all the time. (Is it auto, is it definite, is it specified/computed/used/target value? Why. Is it set by mistake etc. etc.). I have to 100% know that sonething is a bug, a correct behaviour or incorrect behaviour (I misread the spec)

It's especially hard, because by know I already wrote 2 different layout engines for Cascade, and this one is taking way, way more time than I ever imagined, which is very demotivating.

To help with all

Hi y'all. Been working on the CSS engine and a debug system for it.

Here's a little video of that + some live UI editing.

This system is not unlike Chrome Dev Tools, but I also added zoom and UI resize to check for pixel-level errors and responsive behaviours. You can browse the html tree (not DOM!) to see how the selected element is drawn, which is very useful for debugging (helps to see how child-elements affect the parent's size, how wrapping works etc.)

I can also select the tree node and trigger a break on it inside the enigne. Super useful.

It's a lot of work to implement the CSS engine. I literally have to decipher the spec paragraph-by-paragraph using an intermediate representation.

Also, at first I wanted to use my engine for all the CSS rules. But is was bad. I had to add workarounds to make CSS's way of doing things work, which contaminated my A

Ok, just a quick update.

I've been working on 2 things. First, I started to nail down the html/css parsing and the engine. This will allow us to do the next demo (we're going to show working bootstrap.css + stuff like drag-dropping html code onto the canvas to create objects etc.),

And also - I want to finally make a thing that is going to allow our designer to modify/tweak the interface. And we'll use html to do that. He's used html/css for years and we're doing parsing for that anyway, so naturally the html UI specification it going to be better than a cusom text format (maybe). Of course, we'll have to augment the html spec to describe various interactive things (like, waht should happen if this button is clicked)

And second - I've took some time to work on a debug system. Before using a dynamically-generated UI, I wrote it entirely in C++. And it was somewhat debuggable (although, it was still hard to catch a weird engine behaviour sometimes. Lots of pointer hunting was i

Ok this is demo 2, where I try to create a web page or something like that. So now you can actually create something and Cascade is starting to feel like an actual editor.

We planned for this demo to be a bit more polished, but at some point it's become a waste of time, and we decided to leave it at that and move on to working on next milestones.

So here you go: a short video, demonstrating some layer work, colors, gradients, css classes and many more little things. (There were some file open issues - for some reason my system hangs whenever I use open/save file dialog in any program...)

Se you soon! You're all welcome to comment, btw!

I just spent a week debugging (and understanding) color in Cascade. Premultiplied alpha, sRGB, gamma-correction - all that stuff. Citizen scientific calculator, lots of paper and my favorite Papermate Sharpwiter pencils.

Today we had a discussion with our designer about color correctness. Since our tool is for web - we have to be compatible with modern browsers, meaning I have to use non-gamma-corrected gradients.

I'm generally pro- incorrect stuff, if it looks correct. Take this example (familiar to many).

The individual colors on the second gradient may be mathematically right (hopefully! omg), but the overall gradient looks a bit uneven. The black falloff is a bit too sharp. And too much white on the right. Right?

This reminds me of a trick from architecture - where they make long vertical or horizontal things a bit curved- so that they look perfectly straight. The 'front steps' (insert actual architecrute term he

Mkay.

Just a quick update. Working on the css engine. Actually it is rather an interpretation of the css spec, than implementation. I wrote the first version of it long ago. And now when I have UI working, most interaction logic is there, the tree manipulations work etc. - it takes very littele to make huge things work. It's like magic. 'Oh, I want this and that feature', and boom - it works.

This is what I'm working on now. This is a next mini-project that is used to test the features we want + will be used to show off these features once I'm done with it. And the project is - we want a video of making Cascade site with Cascade.

I made a quick recording of how the engine works now. Please nevermind the horrible state of the UI, it does what it has to do for now, but I did not do a beauty-pass yet. Plus text fields occasionally... and it's not a shader bug on the picker - just gif artifacts... anyways. The video.

Ok. First of all, there is more than one way to pronounce Janus, and I want you to specifically choose the latin version [ˈjaː.nus] when reading this post. This is how it's intented. Just fyi.

When dealing with 2 different concepts, that are essentially just 2 ways of looking at the same thing - the image of the two-faced god Janus pops into my mind. At my old job I wrote a thing that was visually comparing 2 sets of georgaphical data, and of course I called it Janus. It's just so nice to have an actual name, instead of 'whatever admin tool for whatever analysis'. What I'm trying to say is I always try to find the metaphorical way of thinking about the stuff I do. It's just fun.

Anyways. Today I want to talk about 2 things, that are sort of the same thing. Or another instance of the Janus problem.

The core idea of Cascade is that it's going to be used for websites. So it's essentially an html editor. And we want people to view how their layouts work. In other words, we

The heart of Cascade it it's layout engine - the second most complicated thing in the app. (Scale tool has first place so far.) I'd never written a UI engine before, but I decided not to read anything on the topic and just go in blind, relying on intuition only. The plan was to get the 'feel' for how things work and only then start the reaserch. And after more than one year I'm still not there. We've build a quick prototype in about 3 months, and after that there hasn't really been much UI work. Just tools, workflow and internal systems. As well as lots and lots of learning.

So anyway. As a start I took a website of a certain design studio and replicated it in C. After maybe 3 passes I had a working engine that supported rows, columns, auto-wrapping, printing text and so on.

Nothing too comlicated yet, but enough to start working on the actual app UI. Since then the engine has grown into a somewhat monstorous 1000-line function

Hey hey everyone! I'm not dead. Unfortunatelly had to take some contract jobs to support the development of this thing so progress has been very slow. But now I'm starting to feel like I'm back.

We (me and our designer, Vova) had some first public showing of Cascade. We visited a local Google-sponsored trade show just to see what's going on with the dev community here. It was really fun to explain that "no, this is not a cloud/js/subsription-model-payment project".

Anyways. You all (and me too) are waiting for updates on actual development. Most recent thing I dis was the scale tool. It's almost funny how bad tools are in many modern editors. For instance - to scale something you usually have to aim the cursor into a 10x10px scale handele, which is nuts. Or - if a tool is universal and does both scale and move operations - you can miss the scale handle by 1 px and move the object insead of scaling. This all makes it almost impossible to work fast.

What we did is a hotkey-a