For those of you who use Degrafa and follow this blog, you may have noticed that things have been a bit quiet lately. Well, that’s because there has been significant work done on a new website and release. If you went to the presentation or Birds of a Feather at Adobe MAX, you got to see first hand the new features and got a brief overview of the new site.

The New Site

First off, let’s talk about what we’ve done to the site. We’re moving the Degrafa site from degrafa.com to degrafa.org. Pretty soon we’ll be forwarding the dot com site to the dot org site.

We’ve now moved all Degrafa content under a single domain, so no more sub-domains, although those will forward as well. Things like the ASDocs, samples and blog are still there, but we’ve begun adding things like screencasts, presentations and articles in a “Learning” section. We’re looking to get these areas set up to allow people to contribute or let us know when they have content to share.

The goal for the site was to make information much more accessible and easy to find without having to scour the internet.

Degrafa Beta 3

More importantly than the site, we’re releasing the next version of Degrafa; Beta 3. This is the biggest release of Degrafa yet and it’s taken the longest to get out, but rightfully so. We’re calling it Beta 3, but it’s more like Degrafa 2.01.

We’ve added a ton of new features that will not only help you push the boundaries of what you thought might be possible with Degrafa, but also made other things, like skinning, a lot easier. I won’t get in to the entire feature list here, but you can check out the long list on the new Degrafa.org “Code” page, along with grabbing the source yourself. The documentation has also been updated.

We all worked really hard to get this release out, but Jason Hawryluk and Greg Dove put a lot of hours into getting this out. Thanks guys!

Note: We’re still working on updating the docs, but will have them updated by next week.

What’s Next?!?

So, where are we going next? Well, we definitely have plans. Plans for new features, optimization and focussing more on community as we move closer to Degrafa 1.0.

Here’s where we’d like to focus:

• Optimization and bug fixes
• Making things like properties and naming consistent, as well as making things a bit more “user-friendly”
• Finishing up splines
• Adding text on a path
• Introducing VectorText, allowing you to add things like gradients to text
• Adding a mechanism to transcode SWFs to Degrafa markup
• Adding the ability to join, punch out, intersect, etc. geometry
• Supporting the community more with screencasts, tutorials, etc.

Those are our initial thoughts, but we always like to hear from others in the community regarding the direction we should go.

Please keep in mind this is all beta and we’ll be making additional refinements in the next week or so. Let us know what pops up so we can fix things as soon as we can. Also, expect to see more samples from the talk that was given at Adobe MAX and, like always, let us know about anything you create.