Animations 102 – changing direction: The examples in the previous entry talked about moving from point A to point B in a straight line: Now...
Animations 103 – going back: After looking at movement paths involving three points, let’s go back to the case of two points: Now, once you...
Animations 201 – color: After seeing how the rules of the physical world constrain and shape movements of real objects, it’s time to turn...
Animations 202 – scrolling: After seeing how the rules of physical world can be applied to animating colors, it’s time to talk about layout...
In the concluding piece, Kirill wraps up by reiterating a primary point of the series -- the fact that emulating the physical laws that define the real world within an animated virtual realm can be a complex task:
Every movement in the real world is governed by the laws of physics. Sometimes these laws are simple, and sometimes they are not. Understanding and emulating these laws in the virtual world of pixels takes time. It takes time to analyze how the objects in the physical world move. It takes time to find the right physical model for the specific dynamic change on the screen. It takes time to implement this physical model in the code. It takes time to optimize the implementation performance so that it is fluid and does not drain too much device power.
Kirill then talks about the modern world, where people are flooded with opportunities for viewing content. It's a world where attention spans have become ever shorter, because there's always something else available to grab (probably briefly) your attention.
This means that your app may have only seconds (minutes if you're lucky, Kirill says) to win over the user. Yes, they'll give it a try. But if anything seems awry, unintuitive, sloppily crafted, etc., they will click away from your page to something else, and they won't ever come back.
It's kind of like, as an application developer, you're not much different from a songwriter. If you write a song, and you want to present it to a producer, you may make a CD with a few songs on it. But, it's guaranteed that the producer will only listen to a verse and the chorus before moving on to the next song. So, if you make a CD for a producer, you put your very best song first, you make the intro very brief, and you make sure that first verse and chorus fully capture the art and energy of the song, in the rendition you send to a producer.
As a software application developer, your time to impress a new user is about the same -- probably less than a minute. In those few seconds, your app has to impress, or it will be abandoned. If your app involves animation, you've got to get it right, realistic, or your application will look amateurish.
It's not all physics, either. Creating appealing animation is an art, as well. It involves careful design. As Kirill says:
Drawing on the existing user experience is an incredibly powerful tool – if used properly. Some things are universal, and some things change across cultures. Distilling the universal triggers and transplanting them to your application is not an easy task. It requires a great deal of time and expertise from both the designers and programmers. And if you do it right, you will create a friendly and empowering experience for your users.
Ultimately, it's all about satisfying the users, giving them what they want. Part of what they want, in an animation, is world that seems "real" even though it's animated. If it doesn't seem real, then it's difficult for the users to relate to what you've created.
Kirill concludes with some discussion of the movie Avatar, after which he summarizes the art and science of animation, and its objectives:
Make your users productive. Make them happy that they have spent time in your application. Make them want to come back and use your other products. Make an emotional connection. Build on what they know. Make them believe that every choice they make is their own. Or better yet, guide them towards where you want them to go while making them believe that they are in charge.
Over the course of this week i’ve talked about movements of physical objects in the real world, and how they can be applied to animating pixels on the screen. The last two entries have just skimmed the surface of animating UI objects, and even such straightforward areas as color animations and scroll animations can be much deeper and more complicated than it originally seems...
Of late I seem to have entered a Twilight Zone game of Whack a Mole with the jdk tests. It appears that the odds that a test can fail on some particular OS or machine, with or without any jdk change is higher than I ever thought possible. Very frustrating. Why is that? I have a list of possible contributing factors...
I had the opportunity to attend the CLS West Event (wiki, attendee photo gallery, eventbrite registration site, CLS session notes page, etc) this last weekend (Jan 9th, 2010) at the Devry campus in Daly City. It was an unconference event. Lots of Community Leaders from different Tech Companies were there which was interesting to me working for Sun--it was a sort of a Community Cabal. STATS: 31 un-conference sessions. (8) classrooms utilized. 80+ people were in attendance, lots of familiar faces from other Bay Area community events. My Notes on the "Communities Go Global" are below as well as a graphical representation which Bay Area Tech Companies and Communities that participated or programs that were discussed...
Maven seems to be one of those topics that brings out passion in many developers. In this series of articles, I want to take a look at some of the common myths and ideas that circulate about Maven, and see how they stand up to the light of scientific examination. Last time, we looked at the idea that Maven automatically updates for every build. This time we look at another myth quoted in this article: that Maven requires an internet connection to delete a directory...
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In the forceTen GeoCoding API there's a simple map-like class named FactSheet, that contains a few attributes about a geographic entity (such as the population count, or the official elevation of the place). It's the typical scenario where you'd use a Map or a map-like class, because data items can be there or not for some entities and/or for different service providers. This class is used with something like...
Bobby Bissett responds Re: migrating a domain configuration from gfv2.x to gvf2.1.1 or gfv3: "If you want to migrate it from v2.1.1 to v3, you can use the upgrade tool for this. It's the 'asupgrade' script in the v3 bin directory. In essence, this will make a copy of your original domainA and then upgrade the copy so that it..."
ruiminde responds Re: Glassfish v3 deployment exception: "It includes the Axis2 library for web services, so yes probably it's using a non-default XML parser (I'm not aware of its low level details)..."
Our current Spotlight is Christopher Lam's How to Create a Scheduler Module in a Java EE 6 Application with TimerService: "Many a time, in a Java EE application, besides the user-triggered transactions via the UI (e.g. from the JSF), there's a need for a mechanism to execute long running jobs triggered over time, e.g., batch jobs. Although in the EJB specs there's a Timer service, where Session Beans can be scheduled to run at intervals through annotations as well as programmatically, the schedule and intervals to execute the jobs have to be pre-determined during development time and Glassfish does not provide the framework and the means to do that out-of-the-box. So it is left to the developer to code that functionality or to choose a 3rd party product to do that..."
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