MiG InfoCom MiG Calendar AShape Developer Manual - Manual (Page 20)

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in absolute time, they will never lag behind. If the computer
can't keep up, for whatever reason, frames are dropped to
keep up rather than played in turn.
Time lines can also progress non-linear. This means that you
can provide any custom
Function that will outline the
progress of the animation. For instance it can slow down or
accelerate. It can even have advance sinus-like equations to
make animations oscillate.
Animation
Animation is an interface that describes how one object
fades into another, given a value between 0.0 and 1.0
( float ). Subclasses provides the actual implementation that
does the transformation. For instance ColorAnimation can
“animate” between two Color s.
The AbstractAnimation class that all current Animation s
subclass provides for caching the values if the frame count is
provided. This is normally a must for animating
Image
transitions for instance but it can of course be turned off.
The Animator
The
Animator class is an abstract class that provides basic
boiler plate functionality for controlling an animation. The
OverrideAnimator is the default implementation and it
provides everything needed to animate some aspect of an
AShape through overrides (as explained above). It does the
animating in an indirect manner, by overriding properties on
the
AShape . It uses its own Thread to set overrides in the
Interactor , which means that for instance one activity can
(optionally) be animated when mouse over:ed. Setting the
override triggers a repaint and the next frame will be shown.
This method of animation means that any property of
AShape that can be overridden can be animated, and since
all properties can be overridden, they can all be animated.
There are seven different types of Animations delivered with
the framework and it is very simple to write your own. You
just have to extend
AbstractAnimation and write one
method that returns the object that corresponds to the
float value ( 0..0 to 1.0 ).
Time Lines
A
TimeLine denotes how frame numbers should relate to
AShape Developer Manual Page 20 / 24