Author Archives: pedroduquevieira

Modellus new animated characters

(Update: Modellus new site is http://modellus.pt)

Thanks to Feel Fine who has given us all their assets from their funny game Sweet Dreams (available on the IPhone) for free, we were able to add a bit more fun for kids learning science subjects through the use of Modellus.

On a technical aspect I don’t think there is much to say because I found things rather easy, the hardest part was retouching the images to fit nicely on Modellus format.
For every animation i use something like this Timeline :

var animationX:Timeline = Timeline {
 repeatCount: Timeline.INDEFINITE
 keyFrames: [
  KeyFrame {
   time: 0s
  },
  KeyFrame {
   time: 1s / fpsPerSecond
   action: function()
   {
     currentFrameIndex = (currentFrameIndex + 1) mod (sizeof frames); // change frame index
     currentImage = frames[currentFrameIndex]; // change currentImage which is bound to an ImageView image property
     if (currentSelectedFramesIndex == (sizeof selectedFrames) - 1)
     { // This is the final frame. I'm just going to stop the animation  animationX.stop(); } } } ] };

You can see the new characters in action on the following video – the animations are actually much smoother than in the video (don’t know why):

If you’re a designer and would like to contribute some of your work: icons, animations, etc to Modellus please contact me (we don’t have the necessary time to create them) – mail is on the about page. Modellus is a free tool, used all around the globe, which aims to aid teaching of science subjects. Please help us shape the future of teaching making it more fun and less abstract. Your work will be credited and will obviously still remain your property.

JavaFX 1.3 – What to expect..

Updated (16 April)

To better plan my projects I’ve always been nosing around trying to figure out what to expect on future JavaFX releases.

After someone on a thread asked me to tell him what I knew about what is to come, I figured that since the list is a bit extensive and other people might be interested in knowing I’d do a post about it on my blog.

So here is what I know so far:

  • New graphics stack called Prism, no longer dependent on awt/swing. Expect better performance.

(Update: You’re probably able to choose whether or not you want to use Prism )

  • All bindings will be lazy (not sure how will that cope up with the rest)

(Update:The runtime will figure out what type of bind to use and always try to choose lazy over normal bind to get better performance. The scene graph has been changed to better accommodate lazy binding. On replace triggers will use normal binding by default.)

3D:

  • 3D Space with 3d transforms putting 2d objects on a 3d space.
  • Perspective and Parallel camera – probably the same feature that exists in Java3D
  • Bounds now is on 3D

A little bit disappointed that there will be no 3d shapes, I needed that on my app. But than again there aren’t probably many people needing this.

(Updade: Just reminded that 3d shapes are done with transformed 2d shapes like triangles or squares, duuuuhhhhh! So you should probably be able to create 3D shapes yourself using the existing 2d shapes.)

Controls:

  • Multi-line TextBox (TextBox is a text input field)
  • Better skinning API. Added Regions
  • Caspian Skin
  • Password Box control
  • Separator control
  • ChoiceBox control. (not sure what this is, if someone knows please post a comment) Its a non-editable ComboBox
  • Spacer Control (for layout purposes)
  • Custom cell support on Lists
  • Menus
  • ToolBar
  • Tree
  • CSS support for charts

The biggest miss here is Table. Of course you can always rely on Swing Table

Graphics:

  • Support for custom cursors
  • Filling shapes with a texture


That’s all I know, also expect bug fixes and performance tuning here and there. I’m guessing It won’t take long for 1.3 to be released.

I think this release will give the so much needed boost to JavaFX: except for the table almost all standard controls, better performance, 3d capabilities and some other nice goodies.

Edit: Don’t forget that this is only what I suppose will be available on 1.3. These are not facts and somethings are probably wrong or not 100% right

Pan and Zoom Modellus 5

(Update: Modellus new site is http://modellus.pt)

The new pan and zoom feature allows you to navigate through a larger animation area, tracking the movement of an object that has left the currently visible area or focus on a particular point.

You can zoom with the mouse wheel which zooms the animation to the area where the mouse is or you can pan by dragging the mouse on an empty area.

If you want to quickly zoom to a particular area you can do so by ctr+clicking the area.

Here’s a video demonstrating Pan and Zoom in action . This is not yet the final interface and will be subject to change, namely a small map will be available showing a zoomed out view of all the animation space.

Modellus 5 brief demo

(Modellus new site is: http://modellus.pt)

If you’ve seen my first blog post: http://pixelduke.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/hello-world/. You’ll know what Modellus is.

Today I want to show a very brief demo of the upcoming Modellus 5. It is written in JavaFX and Swing.

Kirill’s talk on animations: http://www.pushing-pixels.org/?p=1579 gave me the idea of making this demo about the movement of physical objects. Bear in mind that this is still in beta stage.

So on to the demo video:

Have a good weekend. 🙂