Because Ian doesn’t have blog comments and because the Avalon Animation team doesn’t yet have a blog, Elizabeth Nelson (PM) and Matt Calkins (SDE) have asked that I post the following response to Ian’s recent Animating Custom Types in Avalon post:
“I’m happy to report that building custom animations to animate font size is not necessary. (Nevertheless, Ian Griffiths’s sample is a spiffy example of how to build custom animations!) For the time being, TextEffects provides just the font size animation tools he seeks. There’s even a TextEffects sample in the Avalon CTP Announcement that Arik, Karsten and Tim put together.The properties of interest for font size animations are ScaleX and ScaleY.
“This isn’t the end of the story on Font animations — we’re still working on hooking a few things up internally to make it easier to use animations. Regardless of what else we cook up for built-in Font animations, TextEffects will come in handy for animating individual characters in a string in a coordinated manner.
“As for the concern about rendering artifacts when enlarging text, the issue is definitely on our radar!
“Thanks for your enthusiasm for custom animations.”
P.S. I *know* that there are some folks that want the Avalon CTP bits that don’t have MSDN subscriptions. You have my most sincere apologies.
P.P.S. I don’t mean to call the Avalon guys crooks. Those guys work super hard to build the right thing and they’re dying for the feedback. That makes them *very* different than Nixon, who really didn’t want the feedback he got. : )
Ian Griffiths illustrates the core concepts in Avalon animation by implementing a custom font size animation class. Basically, "animation" in Avalon means "changing an object's value over a range in a given time," e.g. changing a font size from 10 to 72 in 4 seconds or an X coordinate from 10 to 100 in 2 seconds. Animation seemed so fancy to me until I broke it down in my head in this way.
Karsten says: "Check out http://www.therhogue.com/WinFX/ for some more Avalon 3D samples. Robert Hogue is an amazing developer and these are definitely worth checking out."
“Microsoft’s roadmap for client UI development has three main phases:
“Today, use Windows Forms v1.1 and observe the Microsoft Patterns and Practices guidance for maintaining clean separation between UI and other application logic.
“When Avalon v1.0 releases (scheduled for mid-2006), we recommend that applications looking to differentiate their user interface such as Web sites and graphically intensive applications such as complex data visualization look closely at Avalon. Other applications should continue using Windows Forms.
“Following the release of Avalon 1.0, the next version of Visual Studio following Visual Studio 2005 will contain tools and designers to support Avalon. At this point, customers should start to move their new development efforts to Avalon and use the Windows Forms/Avalon interoperability features.”
