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Animating the lights on the control panel

For those of you who have not already figured out what I am doing. We are going to replace the square JPEG bitmaps with animations. We will give the animations the same file name as the sliced squares. And with a small amount of editing, we'll modify the file names in the HTML script to point to the GIF files instead of the JPEG's we created. The point of all this is to create a much smaller animation than if we merely animated the buttons on the large image.

Control Panel Tutorial Part 2

Press the New Animation button on the Infobar.

This opens a new animation window which looks very similar to the normal Xara window except now the animation toolbar is enabled (although most of the icons are grayed out because we have not started to create an animation.

Paste the first bitmap into the window (Ctrl v).

For those who are not familiar with the Animation window, here is a brief description of the animation toolbar (if you do not see the animation toolbar, go to Window > Control Bars, check the Gif Animation check box).

  • a. New Frame creates a new animation frame
  • b. Copy Frame copies the contents of the current frame to a new frame
  • c. Delete Frame deletes the current frame and its contents
  • d. Previous Frame steps back one frame per click
  • e. Next Frame steps forward one frame per click
  • f. Frame Properties displays a dialog of frame options including colors and length of time each frame is displayed
  • g. Preview Frame opens a small viewer and displays the current frame
  • h. Animation Properties is almost the same as frame properties
  • i. Preview All Frames opens a small viewer and runs the animation
  • j. Export Animated Gif exports the animation
  • k. Preview Animation in Browser launches your animation in your default browser and provides various information including estimated load times, color depth and file size of animation.

Save your file and save your animation file (these are two separate documents) and take a short break).

TIP: Hold down the Ctrl key and press the Tab key to move between open Xara documents.

 

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