v1.4.0 - Frame Slider, Easing Previews, and Stability Fixes

🎬 Animation Workbench v1.4.0

This release brings significant usability improvements to the Animation Workbench plugin, with a focus on better frame preview controls, enhanced easing visualization, and critical stability fixes.

✨ New Features

Frame Preview Slider

• New slider control next to the frame spinbox for easy scrubbing through animation frames
• Live synchronization between slider and spinbox values
• Smart preview rendering - frames render only when slider is released, not during drag
• Dynamic frame count displayed after the slider, calculated correctly for all animation modes (fixed extent, planar, sphere)

Enhanced Easing Preview

• Theme-aware colors - adapts to dark/light QGIS themes with Kartoza branding
• Smoother animations - bouncing dot indicator shows easing curve behavior
• Combined preview & chart view - single widget with animated visualization

Improved Dependency Handling

• Graceful fallback UI when multimedia libraries (PyQt5 Multimedia) are unavailable
• Better error messages for missing ffmpeg/ImageMagick dependencies
• Clearer status indicators for dependency availability

🐛 Bug Fixes

Critical Stability Fixes

• Fixed SIGSEGV crash in preview rendering caused by functools.partial() callback issues
• Fixed dialog freeze caused by event pile-up in easing animation timer
• Signal cleanup prevents callback accumulation when cancelling preview tasks
• Position caching reduces pyqtgraph overhead in easing dot updates

Code Quality

• Fixed all flake8 linting errors
• Resolved security issues (shell injection vulnerability)
• Added proper noqa comments for intentional module re-exports

🛠️ Developer Experience

Nix Flake Improvements

• Auto-generated pyrightconfig.json for LSP support
• Multiple QGIS versions available: stable, LTR, and master
• Convenience commands: nix run .#test, nix run .#format, nix run .#lint

Neovim Integration

• Project-specific keybindings under <leader>p
• DAP debugpy configuration for QGIS debugging
• LSP support with proper QGIS Python paths

Debugging Tools

• Crash handler options (gdb/catchsegv) in start scripts
• Improved logging and error reporting

📦 Installation

Download the plugin zip from the release assets or install via QGIS Plugin Manager.

🙏 Credits

Made with 💗 by Kartoza | Donate | GitHub

Alpha 16

alpha-16

Last tweaks for release zip builder

Alpha 15

alpha-15

Last tweaks for release zip builder

Alpha 14

alpha-14

fix release zip path

Alpha 13

alpha-13

fix release zip path

Alpha 12

alpha-12

fix release zip path

Alpha 3

This is the third alpha release of the QGIS Animation Workshop Plugin. To install, download the animation_workbench.zip file below and open it in QGIS using the plugin manager.

1. Open QGIS
2. Plugins ➡ Manage and install plugins ...
3. Choose the Install from zip tab
   
4. Select the animation_workbench.zip download
5. Click the Install Plugin button.

Alpha-2

Many updates including threading, cancel jobs, code refactor by Nyall etc. but still not production ready....

What's Changed

• Fixes by @nyalldawson in #1
• Split out animation logic from GUI dialog class , fix jumpy camera motion by @nyalldawson in #3
• Fixes by @nyalldawson in #4
• Add spin box to change preview frame by @nyalldawson in #5
• Use 3.26 API to set frame rate and current frame number in map settings by @nyalldawson in #7
• Use QgsBlockingProcess to run movie creation commands by @nyalldawson in #8
• Use a wrapper task so that we show overall progress through the export by @nyalldawson in #9
• Implement data defined min/max scales by @nyalldawson in #10
• Fix wrong icon path (and other workshop references) by @nirvn in #27

New Contributors

• @nyalldawson made their first contribution in #1
• @nirvn made their first contribution in #27

Full Changelog: apha-1...alpha-2

Alpha 1

This is definately not production ready yet....