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Kairos Camp 1.0 report and current (amazing) development
Published on November 25, 2022 by Natan Sinigaglia

It's a bit late for the Kairos Camp 1.0 report, I know :)
the truth is that it's been a crazy period of research, and simply I didn't want to stop and update the community before having something to show.

So to quickly summarize:
The Kairos gang met in Berlin for Kairos Camp 1.0 last September.
Me, sebescudie, gregsn, azeno, lasal, lars, amir, joreg, and texone had few days together to work as a team on structuring Kairos as an official community project: 
  • We got acquainted with the Kairos world, diving deep into the principles and the implementation of the concepts.

    We recorded this deep dive session for anyone interested in having a full introduction to the nature of kairos. Yes, we also created a Kairos Research Lab YouTube channel.
  • We made a dedicated Github public space, the Kairos Research Lab.
  • We moved the precious Kairos repo from my personal account into the Kairos Research Lab.
  • We created a shared Kairos Research Lab Miro space with a Specification board, a Roadmap board and a Communication board.
  • In the Specification Miro board we brainstormed, wrote down all the aspects of the project and started identifying tasks.
  • In the Kairos repo we created a Github Kairos project where we created all the tasks as issues, assigning them to team members.
    The DevOps people (sebescudie, randal and lars) also defined the branching strategy for the repo and set up a convenient Git Flow to simplify branching management.
By the end of the week we happily managed to structure the teamwork and celebrated at the bar on the last evening.

Since then, maaaaany things happened. Each one got sucked into his own rabbit hole of work, but I managed, together with gregsn and elias, to get back full-time on kairos development already in mid-october.
In summary:
  • Timeline internals and nodeset got a huge amount of fixes and improvements
  • An ImGui based object Inspector is in an advanced state of development. Azeno is doing his magic with this.
     
  • Me, gregsn and azeno completely reworked the AlchemX library:
    • Simpler ways to describe Interpolation techniques
    • Completely new way of implementing and instantiating core nodes by using an new feature: the Dynamic instantiation of Generic types (developed by gregsn and azeno for kairos but incredibly useful for any library developer).
    • Easier way to implement interpolation/blend techniques for custom types
    • Incredibly easy-to-read patches for the ones that want to study the library
    • updated and new help patches (thanks to sebescudie) to explain the library and show the features
    • sebescudie also set up the AlchemX  nuget deployment pipeline.
      Soon it will be available as a -pre release nuget for you to test
  • Since last week I've been hard working together with lasal on creating the Timeline UI. That's the only missing part to make use of the new powerful Kairos.
    • Using our beloved "Model&Runtime" programming pattern I built the UI architecture, which feels really cool so far. Also here we implemented the Dynamic Instantiation of Generic types technique to simplify the implementation of widgets.
    • With the help of mr. ImGui (anton), we're looking at how to better use ImGui library to draw all the parts that don't require advanced custom widgets (for very graphical elements like keyframe we still use vl.skia).
    • We managed to implement a sort of "instancing approach" in skia, optimizing the drawing of thousands of objects by grouping them by "kind" and drawing them as single paths
    • We started to sketch all the elements of the track editors, with keyframes and interpolations for many different types
It looks like everything is rolling fast and great!
I'll update you along the way and I really hope that the Kairos team will make this Christmas special :)

If you appreciate our efforts and see how this can very soon revolutionize the way we work in gamma, please consider becoming a financial contributor of the project! (here on Open Collective)

with love

The Kairos team


🎉  1

Eriol Fox

Posted on November 29, 2022

This is very cool! as a Designer in OSS I appreciate the care and attention taken to the product decisions and processes. I would love to speak to the team about it sometime :D

Natan Sinigaglia

Posted on November 29, 2022

Hello Eriol, Thanks so much for the feedback!
Whenever you want, I'm available for a chat ;)
You can contact me through my website or on the kairos Research Lab Chat room 
Best
❤️  1