Chapter 12. Animation Fundamentals

It’s About Time

Animation is one of the key concepts and techniques behind Filthy Rich Clients, giving our applications a more dynamic feel as the interface moves smoothly in response to user actions. Animation is a large and diverse topic, covering operations as simple as copying an image around on the screen or as complex as the latest 3D shooter game or animated movie. For our purposes, we focus on a specific use of the term and technique: Animation is the time-based alteration of graphical objects through different states, locations, sizes, and orientations. There are two important concepts to grasp from this simple definition: time-based and alteration.

Alteration is easy to explain. It simply means that ...

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