@Humphrey, pls don't apologise, your view is also correct in that we should aim higher or better or be different. However since you very well understand that locally done stuff has a very long long and difficult road ahead, whether code or graphics, we should also appreciate that creation of tools/platforms is what is going to lead us somewhere. That ability places us on par with the rest of the world. Look back at the first release of Adobe photoshop and how basic, buggy it was?
If Chacha's app is not going to change the world, at least from an engineering view, it 's a smaller step towards the bigger picture and I think we should acknowledge this. You've done code, so you can appreciate the complexity of even creating a simple app, let alone one that imports pixels into memory for rendering. If he had done something like go buy a bike dynamo from a shop and then weld it to a bike for charging a mobile phone, then I too would want to do some bashing.
In my study during game programming, I looked at various 3d rendering programs, but my goal was not to use any of these tools. So I had use photoshop to create a "sprite sheet", load it into my code and from that code write loops to animate. It was good to know this, yet the same knowledge that I learnt like the randomness algorithms is now helping me do things with XML.
In a nutshell, Chacha's deserves an acknowledgement for his efforts in the creation of a tool. Now who uses it or not, the market can never guarantee that. Check with any product vendors of which sells faster: netbooks or laptops?
Hope to see your contribution on Adobe After Effects.
Rgds. :-)
