You are here: Recent News » Ajax Animator

 

Ajax Animator

Summary

Ajax Animator is a free open source web based flash ide designed for simplicity and community effort.

Project Mission/Goals

To offer a free web based alternative to the Macromedia/Adobe flash IDEs, and allow anyone, anywhere to easily create animations.

Development Status

This project isn’t that mature, especially since there is only one developer. Now at subversion revision 147 here is a brief outline of key implemented features:

Ajax Animator currently supports:

  • Right Click Context Menu (timeline and canvas)
  • Vector Frame Graphic Editor (so you can move objects after you’ve drawn them)
  • Saving/Opening Projects!
  • Partial Multi Layer Support
  • History
  • Animation Browser (only of work you have made)
  • Partial Undo
  • Color Picker with Color Pallette
  • Top Menu
  • Tabs
  • Manual
  • FAQ
  • About Section
  • Duplicate Frame
  • Copy/Paste
  • Timeline tooltips that tell you an outline of stuff in a frame when you hover your mouse over it (eg. frame number/layer and object count, empty or not. etc. and will soon show thumbnails of the frame)
  • Preview Flash Animations
  • Export Flash Animations
  • Nice User Interface
  • Multi-User Advanced Animation Browser
  • Full Multi-Frame System
  • Tweening
  • Tutorials
  • FAQ
  • New Homepage
  • Standalone Animation Browser

Ajax Animator supports, but is not released yet * None Ajax Animator is planned to suppport (in rough estimated chronological order):

  • autosave

The following is not currently in development but is planned

  • Actionscript Editor/Compiler
  • Google Gears Offline Execution
  • Java Applet Based, Client Side Flash Generation
  • Compilation to SVG/JS

Download

Since it is a web application, it’s not really necessary to download it, but the source code is available from subversion, hosted by google code.

The google code project homepage is located at:

http://code.google.com/p/ajaxanimator/

The subversion repository can also be viewed from your browser.

http://ajaxanimator.googlecode.com/svn/trunk

For windows users who do not have subversion, I have created a small batch file based application that will automatically download the sources.

http://antimatter15.110mb.com/SubversionSourceDownloader.zip

Application

This is the version uploaded onto my own servers that offer both a demo and an actual usable application.

http://antimatter15.110mb.com/Animator

Demo Account: Username: Username Password: Password (it’s the default text on the login form)

The demo username/password is for both anonymous and demo usage purposes, I encourage you to make your own account though.

Browser Compatibility

Currently the application is limited to standards compliant web browsers that support SVG, such as gecko based browsers (Mozilla, Firefox, K-melon, etc.) and WebKit versions 522.11+ (Safari Public Beta 3 and up) Opera is also supported. IE has been attempted to be supported but has been forevermore abandoned because I realized the eternal incorrigible crappyness of the Internet Exploder, in entirety including 5,6,7 and [likely] any that will exist in the future.

On the other hand, i’m working on supporting Konqueror (KDE 4), and having it work on linux better (since my windows crashed and....)

Plugins/Extensions

The application supports extensins/plugins in the form of small user generated scripts to either function as a macro type thing, or adding a feature.

As of August 20, 2007, there is an extension for animation tweening, but it is no longer necessary for people to use an extention, as tweening is implemented in the current version in an automatic flash-ide style manner.

In a unrealeased testing version, the applicaiton uses the Ext UI Framework, including the Ext debug console, allowing people to deubg it, and execute scripts from there.

The applicaion reccomends using Ext’s Dom Inspector/script debugger to execute plugins/scirpt/extnesions, and the “script/macro executor” has been removed in an unreleased version

File Format

There (as of December 13 2007) are 3 file formats. The first is the one that is sent to the server when compiling an animation to .swf. it is an xml document, with svg child nodes, the second is the file format for AXML 1, which is the escaped innerHTML of the canvascontainer, it is currently deprecated. The third, is AXML 2.0 it supports the saving of tweens, keyframes, etc. remembers the current active frame, framerate, heights and widths. It is essentailly some json metadata seperated by a ;; delimiter and a highly modified format 1. for example {};;<Ax></Ax>

ajaxanimator.txt · Last modified: 2008/01/27 12:19 by antimatter15