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!