FLEXIBLE GENERATION OF ANIMATIONS USING ANIMAL

Abstract

ANIMAL is a tool for generating animations suitable for integration in lectures. Animations can begenerated by visual editing using drag and drop, scripting using the built-in scripting language andgeneration by function calls in the ANIMAL API. ANIMAL offers the primitives point, polyline /polygon, text, arc and list element. All elements are adaptable to subtypes such as square, ellipse orcircle segment. Animations consist of separate steps containing an arbitrary number of effects each.Current effects include show/hide, move, rotate and change color and can be given both offset andduration, measured in milliseconds or internal time units. Both scripting and API support inclusion ofsource/pseudo code with indentation, element and code highlighting, arrays including index pointersand relative object placement. Automating animation generation is easily accomplished. The resultinganimation files seldom exceed 10kB. ANIMAL is implemented in Java and available athttp://www.informatik.uni-siegen.de/~inf/Software/Animal/.