Animated Update: AE comes to iOS
Our favorite animationEngine is updated with iOS and Mac App store compliance

by Malte Brill

Hi everyone!

It's been a while since my last newsletter article. Quite a few things have happened in-between. Our favorite tool has seen many updates and support for new platforms. Reason enough to work on animationEngine!

For those of you who do not know it: animationEngine is a script library for liveCode that lets you move objects, check for collisions, do color animations and lots of other stuff that comes in handy when you are working with rich user interfaces, plan to do a game, or want to spice up your stacks a bit. You can see a little video with some examples of animationEngine in action here.

The library has been around since 2005 and is proven to work quite nicely for many of you. However, the new platforms supported by LiveCode (and especially iOS) required us to do a lot of work on the codebase, to make it work as expected on both desktop and mobile devices.

Multitouch constraining
Previous versions of animationEngine relied on mouse messages being sent to constrained controls using either the constrainLinear, constrainCircular, constrainRectangular or constrainElliptical properties. Major parts of the library have been reworked to support constrained dragging of controls on iOS devices. The implementation in animationEngine 4 now allows dragging multiple controls at the same time on iOS devices. No changes to the syntax were necessary. You can simply set any of the constrain properties and have all of them react on the device.

But other things are changing as well. Apple has introduced their new app store for the Mac. While I see this as a huge chance for developers, it puts a few constraints on us and we, as developers, need to make sure to follow the rules as closely as possible. This also demanded some attention for animationEngine.

AppStore compliance
We rewrote parts of animationEngine, that could potentially cause applications using animationEngine to be rejected. Everything inside animationEngine behaves like a nice App Store citizen now.

New command aeScrollTo
The command aeScrollTo has been introduced into animationEngine. This command allows you to scroll a group or field in both x and y direction at the same time.

aeScrollTo pControl,pNewHScroll,pNewVScroll,pDuration,[pMethod]

The first parameter is a long reference to a group or field;
pNewHscroll and pNewVScroll are the desired new values for the scroll of the control;
pDuration is the time needed to reach the new scroll value in milliseconds;
pMethod: the easing method used to calculate the transition or empty. Valid methods are: in,out,inOut,bounce or overshoot

Changes to aeEnterFrame and aeExitFrame
Both messages are now being sent with an additional parameter that holds the command that called aeEnterFrame or aeExitFrame.

Specific Bug fixes
In previous versions of animationEngine setting the constrainLinear of a control did not reset the other constraining properties. This could cause execution to halt with a recursion limit reached error.

Curious? You will find a fully functional trial version of AE 4 here, or you can buy a copy here.

The price for existing users is $55. You can upgrade from any version of animationEngine or arcadeEngine.

If you bought a retail version of animationEngine (means that was not part of a special offer or bundle) after Sept. 30th 2010 you are entitled to a free upgrade. If you do not automagically receive a new registration code, please get in touch, quoting your purchase order number, so I can get you updated. If you bought AE through the new store on RRs website, getting the update price is very easy. Please log into your account. It will prompt you that updates for your products are available. Choose the updates you want and add them to the basket.

If your purchase is older than the new RR store, you already have received a coupon code, that will give you access to the upgrade price. If you did not receive that coupon code, please get in touch with support@runrev.com to sort things out.

I hope you enjoy the animationEngine update. Watch this space for more announcements on tutorials and even more stuff added to animationEngine over the next few weeks.

All the best,

Malte

About the Author Malte Brill is long time Revolution User and revSelect pioneer. CEO of derbrill Multimedia and CTO of awesomemegamightygames.