re: 1… i do agree that the arrows (and the attribute names that are intended to be next to them, but not shown in this figure) are more useful. what i’m trying to address are questions about how to access specific types of objects.

re: 2/3… yeah, i’m not totally sold on the Collection layout. (to be honest, i was working on a different layout when i accidentally found this more complete version, so i went with it for now.) i do like to be complete, though, so i’ll continue to refine it.

re: 4… figure isn’t complete, although i’m concerned about space constraints for a printed book. maybe i need to have a fold-out wall poster. fyi, i refer to this project as a scripting “book”, but it’s in quotes for a reason — i’m not fully committed to a book format, but it’s a shorter word to type when explaining what the heck i’m doing.

re: 5… nice idea. i had planned to use bg boxes to identify the Project, Timeline, and Render Queue panels to help correlate the UI to the obj hierarchy. if you’re familiar with my work on the scripting reference for the old Useful Assistants plug-in, this would be clearer.

thanks again!

This is really nice.

I hope its appropriate for me to offer my honest and best-attempt-at-professional criticism. (In return I’ll find it completely appropriate for you to attend or ignore or even delete my remarks entirely as you see fit. )

1. It’s showing two concepts here, “inheritance” (grey boxes) and “ownership” (arrows). They’re both useful, but maybe less space needs be dedicated to the inheritance… maybe even smaller text for the abstract base classes, or just an annotation in the box. “AVLayer Layer”. The class names usually tell you anyway.

2. Collections. This is almost a special case; the fact that Layers and OutputModules are both gathered in a Collection subclass is, well, unexciting. Also, Collection is so lightweight, and its subclasses are all named SomethingCollection, that its greybox owner could just be inferred. This might tidy up the boxes a little.

3. Singular vs Plural. Maybe the arrow-style could show the owns-1 or owns-many relationship. Or show the box as the top of a stack. Or some other graphic contrivance to name the Collection (array) object, but give star status to its contents.

4. …where’s the loop? I think AVLayer contains a reference to an AVItem. This loopy nestability might be tricky to diagram, but it’s the superpower that makes After Effects so amazing.

5. Oh… some of the boxes could be decorated with the appropriate little icon. The CS3 “AE” square for application, and the various project window icons for Comp, Footage, Folder. Camera, Light, T for Text. Nothing overboard, but when there’s a clear correspondence, it might be handy. Smallish; the text is more important.

Pardon the length of this comment. Cheers, pix out, and all!