I just stumbled across the apngasm Kickstarter campaign - it's an effort to crowdfund better tools for creating APNGs (think animated GIFs but with better colour depth and transparency). They've already reached their target, so that part of the project should definitely go ahead.

It's their stretch goals that might be interesting to people here:

* $25,000: A keyframe animation editor with basic tween animation features for Inkscape complete with SVG+SMIL output and export to APNG...

* More than $25,000 - will be put into improvement of the libraries and tools and to create better and more robust animation editor features for Inkscape...


I have to admit that I'm cynical about them creating a decent animation editor for Inkscape, even with $25k behind them - but they've stated that their work will be Open Source, so even if they just manage to create a basic platform that others can build on it will hopefully lead to better things in future.

I've just received a project update, and they've moved their stretch goals around. The good news is that a GIMP plugin for APNG has been set as a stretch goal for $12.5K - the bad news is that the Inkscape editor is now a $32K stretch goal! The update can be found here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/374 ... sts/574836

*Sigh*

Now they've dropped the GIMP and Inkscape stretch goals entirely.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/374 ... sts/582458

Apologies to anyone who pledged based on my earlier posts. I always thought they were being ambitious - it's just a shame they didn't realise it sooner.

I do appreciate them being focused on the main goal but it is more than ridiculous to announce, after you`ve reach the goal, that your project priorities would be slightly different.

If you look closer you`ll see only one backer with 2.500 pledge ,)