Chet Haase's Blog

Move It!

Introducing Animated Transitions, a new library for the easy creation of animated segues between application states.

It's been a long slog, from initial demos of the technology in a session on "Advanced 2D" at JavaOne 2005, to use of an early version of the library in the Aerith application, to finishing off the library and creating more demos exercising it for the book Filthy Rich Clients, to getting legal approval for pushing the actual source code (an exercise over the last several months that was not unlike slamming the refrigerator door on my head, over and over. Every day.).

But it's finally done, and the long-awaited day is finally here:

The project is available on java.net at http://animatedtransitions.dev.java.net with a BSD license.

The library is fully described in Chapter 18 of Filthy Rich Clients. That chapter includes a complete description of the library's API, detailed explanations of two sample applications that use the library, and some nitty-gritty details on how the library internals work.

But because there are probably a couple of people left on the planet that do not yet have a copy of the book (no idea how this happened. Maybe it's because we have been so quiet about it. We should really talk more about it), and because I'm such a nice guy and all, I wrote up a short tutorial on the basics of using the library, along with a new demo that shows the basics in action. You can find that tutorial in the java.net article, "Create Moving Experiences with Animated Transitions".

In fact, here's a web-started version of the demo so that you can see it in action. Click on the handy image below and run it. Click on the More/Less buttons to see what it's all about. Note: There are some artifacts reported on the Mac, perhaps related to the way they treat layout and the panels that contain the buttons.

Play around with it. Check out the article and the accompanying demo. Check out the demos on the book's website. Write your own demos. Or, even better, use the library in your actual applications. Make those applications more dynamic and help your users actually understand the interfaces they're beset with.

Go on: Move it!

Comments

• I, ugh, like to move it, move it!

  Posted by: trembovetski on October 23, 2007 at 09:55 AM

• Chet--looks like nice work. Coincidentally, I just came across this: http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/parent.php?pattern=transition--a set of pages on Yahoo describing different use-cases for different kinds of transitions. Maybe some day we'll have these pre-packaged for Java as well--your work seems like a good base to build on. Cheers, Patrick

  Posted by: pdoubleya on October 23, 2007 at 12:16 PM

• Do you and/or Romain plan on giving any talks in the near future? I missed the JavaOne conference this year and after reading your book I would love to hear more about animated transitions and general Java2D from the authors first hand.

  Posted by: brandonw on October 23, 2007 at 01:11 PM

• 
  trembovetski: That would have made an excellent title for the blog. Maybe next time I'm moved to write a piece on it.

  
  pdoubleya: Thanks for the pointer. Now that AnimTrans is out in the wild, like Fa the dolphin, being sent out into the ocean by Pa just before the hunters arrived to gun him down, I'd like to think about ways to enhance and generalize the functionality. There are some hard constraints to the current library (listed on the project page) that I'd like to address and move toward a more general transition-effects library that could be incorporated into the platform.

  
  brandonw: No plans for another talk soon, although a couple of the ones we did in the past year or two were recorded and are available online. You might check out the links from the book site to videos such as our JavaPolis at parleys.com.
  

  Posted by: chet on October 23, 2007 at 01:21 PM

• brandonw: Slight correction... Romain and I will be giving talks in the coming months, it's just not clear whether any of them will be specifically about "Filthy Rich Clients". I'll be speaking about the future of the Java client technologies at QCon in San Francisco on November 7th, both Romain and I will be at JavaPolis in December (speaking about ... not sure, ask me on December 6th...), and we both plan to speak at JavaOne 2008 of course (speaking about ... not sure yet).

  Posted by: chet on October 23, 2007 at 01:30 PM

• I get a java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: Bad version number in .class. The .jnlp says j2se version="1.5+" . Did you compile with JDK6?

  Posted by: dwalend on October 24, 2007 at 05:33 AM

• 
  dwalend: Thanks for the heads-up. I had mistakenly compiled the demo jarfile with SE 6 (the dependency libs, TimingFramework and AnimatedTransitions are both compiled against 1.5). I've uploaded a 1.5 version of the demo file, so I think that it will now work.

  
  By the way, for anyone that has problems running it, you can see the desired effects in a movie on the article's site. (Or just download the source and libs and run it locally).
  

  Posted by: chet on October 24, 2007 at 07:29 AM

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