Animé 1.0

Coding: Jesse Blue • Idea & Design: Clue
Copyright 1995 Ninjaforce • All rights reserved

Animé is a small New Desk Accessory that helps you creating animations with the major four GS painting programs: Platinum Paint™, DreamGrafix™, Deluxe Paint II™ and PaintWorks Gold™. You draw the frames in these programs, and Animé automatically plays them back as an animation. The animation can instantly be saved as a PaintWorks animation file. After using Animé for some time, you will soon agree that it is an indispensable tool for creating “hand–made” animations on the Apple IIGS.

To get an impression of how Animé works, install it (by copying it into the System:Desk.Accs folder), enter one of the painting programs mentioned above, open the file ‘Anime.Demo’ and activate the NDA by selecting it from the Apple Menu. Animé now scans the picture for frames and plays them back as an animation in the lower right corner of the screen. During the animation, the following keys are available:

Creating your own animations...

...with Animé is quite easy. All you have to do is to follow some guidelines Animé requires in order to work properly:

1) The screen all your animation frames are in MUST be 320x200.

2) All frames (i.e. the outlines, or boxes) MUST be BYTE–ALIGNED. Since one byte equals two pixels on the screen, the leftmost pixels of a frame must have an EVEN x-coordinate, while the rightmost pixels must have an ODD x-coordinate. The boxes’ vertical bars MUST be two pixels wide.

3) The size of all frames MUST be the same.

4) Finally, all frames MUST have the same key color. The key color is the color of the outline that indicates a frame.

Holding down the ‘option’ key while invoking Animé brings up the Animé Options dialog providing the following features:

Scan Screen (OA–S): Checking this option tells Animé to scan the entire screen for frames, not the actual picture you are working on stored somewhere in memory by the paint program. This way you can use other paint programs to create animations with the help of Animé.

Key Color: Lets you change the key color. The default is one.

Menu Key (OA–M): If you want to be able to activate Animé with one keypress, then select this option. Be aware that other applications may use the same key equivalent. Changes to this option can only get active the next time you launch an application. The default is –Y, since both Platinum Paint and Dreamgrafix do not use this key equivalent.

Note: PaintWorks Gold does not support NDA key equivalents!

Originally, Animé was created as an internal development tool. However, it turned out to be that nifty we felt other users might also have a use for it. So we added PaintWorks Animation support (having HyperStudio and HyperCard GS users in mind), a desktop interface to make it more user friendly (and professional) and some other little things. Finally, we send the program to Lee Golden because we wanted Animé to be published on Softdisk G–S (and thus make a little money with it). Unfortunately, Lee had some (yet unknown) problems with it, so we are now releasing Animé to the GS community as freeware.

Well, that’s all about it. Happy animating!

(“Not bad for our first ‘real’ desktop program, eh?!”)

“Ninjaforce - Isch geb’ Dir korrekte Software!”