December 04 2009 
Holiday Treats from DerBrill
A Vendors Eye View of MegaBundle 2009
As a "veteran" on revSelect I have participated in both previous bundles. You might have gotten yourself one of those, containing an earlier version of the DerBrill add on animationEngine. This year DerBrill put two add ons into the goodie bag, a fresh new update to AnimationEngine, now version 3.0, and chartsEngine. Let me take this opportunity to introduce both libraries to you.
I am very happy that we managed to roll out animationEngine 3 before the MegaBundle started. Why is that? Because I am very proud of what we did with AE. This library is my baby. I use it in each and every project I am working on. The first iterations, I admit it, were a tad bit too complicated to use. The stuff they did, they did right, BUT it still required a fair amount of revTalk knowledge to get something useful out of it. You had to write your own timers to make your stacks dance and swing. Personally, I did not mind that. Actually, until RunRevLive in Edinburgh this year I never realized that writing timed scripts is not the easiest thing you are able to do in Rev. Though the basic concept is easy to grok, it is complicated to get the layout of your script right. It is complicated to save that millisecond which finally makes the difference and it is complicated to not end up with a whole jam of pendingmessages and not get stuck.
I only realized that when I talked to a few users. Here is a quote: "The stuff you can do with AE is impressive, I own a license, but still it is very complicated to use. I end up writing the same code again and again and still performance could be better". After looking at some code, it was relatively easy to figure out the bottlenecks and we managed to tweak the code to gain good performance. What I learned was that something needed to be done about ease of use. And what could be easier than a couple of one liners? AE 3 has quite a few new commands that actually do something when you use them. For example if you want to animate the change of height of a control :
aeChangeHeight the long ID of grc 1,200,1000,"inOut"
aeChangeBackColor the long ID of grc 1,"yellow",1000,"out"
AE creates the needed timers. It adjusts the framerate if necessary and it performs well. You can take a look at a demo revlet here. For those of you who have not made the jump and installed the plugin yet (you´re really missing out folks!) here is a movie. As you can see, AE is not for games only. You can also use it to spice up your user interface. And did you know that the (much loved) datagrid likes AE too? So there we are, animationEngine in the bag.
What else from us? charts! This one has not been in the bag before. ChartsEngine is a powerful, yet lightweight library to create charts in a Revolution stack. It has been optimized to render data on the fly at high speed. The following chartTypes are available:
- Lines
- LinesStacked
- Bars
- BarsStacked
- Pie
- Doughnut
chartsEngine ships with full documentation and example stacks to demonstrate its use. Download it and try it out for free.
I had the chance to give a webinar on the topic of chartsEngine, so if you like to learn more, I suggest you point your browser here.
This is our little contribution to this years massive goodie bag. There is so much stuff in it, I want one myself. *grabshiscreditcardandponders* Well there are a couple of days left. The megabundle offer ends on 31st December. And the holidays are for grabbing new toys, aren´t they?
 |
|
