iPhone, iPod Touch, and TP4

staticattic

I was playing around with my iPod Touch (not worth the money BTW, but that is another topic for another day) and was wondering, is there a way to make TP buttons and popups come in and out in that same fashion?

Joe Hebert

There are show and hide effect properties on the general tab of a popup that allow you to slide and fade from any position. The tweener can create illusions of text zooming in and out. And you also have multi-state butttons/bargraphs to help with animations. If the effects you create look choppy, you'll have to beef up the memory in the touch panel. I was surprised how quickly the memory gets eaten up when there is stuff moving around the screen.

Have fun.

staticattic wrote:

I was playing around with my iPod Touch (not worth the money BTW, but that is another topic for another day) and was wondering, is there a way to make TP buttons and popups come in and out in that same fashion?

staticattic

I don't want to copy the Apple animations word for word, but I do like the way the screens "grow" from the middle of the screen and "shrink" back to the middle of the screen when done. But like you suggested, that would needlessly eat up memory. Something I was able to do that looks pretty cool and gives the buttons a 3D look was copy and paste a button, invert it, make it a little shorter than the original, and make it semi-transparent. It gives the illusion of the buttons having a reflection. Personally, when I design TP layouts, I like the look of "glass" buttons, so this effect enhances the look quite nicely.

a_riot42

To make a popup grow and shrink you would need a multistate button and enough images that would make the simulation look smooth. If you have a popup, then take a screen shot of it and then in a graphics program, make a series of 20 images from that image that got 5% smaller until the image disappeared. Then when the user hits the exit button on the popup, you would have to get rid of the real popup, and then show the new multistate button in its place that went through all the images. I have tried something similar and it looked fine and smooth, but was just far too much work to think of implementing on a large scale. If your popup contains buttons that do feedback then your image won't match it exactly, unless you have a different series of images depending on the state of the buttons. As you can see it becomes a lot of work quickly. It would be nice if the graphics firmware supported genie effects and moving popups on screen etc, but I don't think AMX will be giving us that anytime soon as it takes hardware acceleration to pull it off smoothly. I have had a couple of clients that were Apple freaks and wanted to make a TP look and feel like an Apple product but since you can only really do a pale imitation I didin't feel it was worthwhile. Maybe the new TP that comes out in 2008 will have some surprises in store.
Paul