Silverlight Animations Made Easy with Sv Fx

I love animations – in moderation.  While flashy was in some years ago, it didn’t last long and frankly, I find them annoying. Yet when you think about it, big screen movies use animation to fade in different sequences and mold them together in an artistic fashion.  Done right, you don’t really even notice them but everything melds together nicely.

I am frequently appalled when I see someone first getting their smart phone.  A typical comment:  “Look how cool it is when you drag an email to the trash can and it wooshes in!”   It’s not amazing to them that they are getting email over a freakin phone, something that was a unheard of a few short years ago. No, it’s the animimation that impresses them. So animations have become a necessity, and since Silverlight supports them out of the box, why not?

Which bring up my next point.  Animation is not easy.  Yes, I know Blend 4 has a number of widgets that makes it easier, but if you really want a quality presentation, you end up having to learn how to xaml storyboards, and frankly, it’s a field into itself that I don’t want to have to master. I just want my UI to look great.

Well fortunately the team at Cellbi Software (Steve Li and David Adams) have done all the work for you and made this a no-brainer with declaritive animations.  All you do is drop in a bit of xaml, and it’s all done for you. 

I first saw this type of declarative animiations in Nikhil Kothari’s (of the Ria Services Team at MS) Silverlight.FX framework.  He includes several in it and they, like Sv FX are very easy to use.  But Nikhil hasn’t updated it in over a year and it’s not something I would use in a new project.  But that type of animiation is great, a couple of xaml statements and you are done.  Here is a sample being used in a Silverlight Navigation application:

<navigation:Frame.Template>

          <ControlTemplate TargetType=”navigation:Frame>

                    <cellbi:TransitionControl Content=”{TemplateBinding Content}” PatternType=”Rotation3DConcaveSlideLeftRightInstant” />

          </ControlTemplate>

</navigation:Frame.Template>

Sv Fx comes with over 500 different animations so whatever you looking for, you probably going to find it.  You can see them in the online demo. But it’s not just animiations that you get, it’s a number of controls as well; its a whole package.

Read more: SilverlightDev.net

Posted via email from Jasper-net