Chapter 22. Animation and behaviors
This chapter covers
- Providing interactive animations
- Using keyframes
- Using and creating easing functions
- Working with and creating behaviors
Believe it or not, there once was a time when I had to cower in my cube at a client site, trying to make sure no one saw me designing icons in a graphics program, or hand-coding subtle timer-based animation for an application UI. Working with those things was looked upon as “not real work.” At the same time, the clients expected icons and application UI to magically appear as though someone just pressed the “Make it Awesome” button on an IDE.
Gladly, for most companies, those days are gone. The value of good graphics, good UX, and for the most part, good animation have become mainstream in all but the most conservative organizations. The last of those, and probably the least broadly accepted, is animation.
Animation is a relative newcomer to the world of application development. Yes, creative types have been doing it for years, but many of us haven’t seen much animation in our own applications, web or otherwise. Flash, WPF, Silverlight, and jQuery, not to mention the vastly improved motion graphics on TV and in movies, have all helped to finally make animation mainstream.