Frustrating and probably simple newb animation problem.

well, i wouldn't say it is exactly simple, but i wouldn't say it is exactly that hard either. but don't go by me, i am just an avid Flash designer and coder who is now being forced by Jeve Stobs to work up some other bags of tricks.

if i was building it in an arena where i couldn't do it in Flash, i would approach this as a javascript project.

i built an insanely simple example here:
ww.demetri-media.com/FlashTalker/java.html

in my example you activate the javascript by clicking on the button. you could of course have it start automatically when the page loads, rather than by a button click.

each quote/statement is in its own DIV tag each with a unique ID. the visibilities of these DIVs are initially set to 'hidden'. then the javascript function uses some simple timeouts to sequentialy reveal/hide them, then it calls itself to start all over again.

surely not the best way, but it illustrated the concept of what has to be done fairly well. maybe a conditional loop using a variable could keep this going better ( an infinity loop maybe ? )

you could add more elaborate script - animating scripts - to have the DIVs fade in and out rather than just appearing and disappearing.

here is the complete code for the page in the example. i hope this helps , or at least gives you ideas to explore. note: i removed most of the html brackets ><


!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"
head
script type="text/javascript"
function fadeRevealDivs()
{
var timer1=setTimeout("document.getElementById('divOne').style.visibility='visible'",500);
var timer2=setTimeout("document.getElementById('divTwo').style.visibility='visible'",1500);
var timer3=setTimeout("document.getElementById('divThree').style.visibility='visible'",2500);
var timer4=setTimeout("document.getElementById('divOne').style.visibility='hidden'",1500);
var timer5=setTimeout("document.getElementById('divTwo').style.visibility='hidden'",2500);
var timer6=setTimeout("document.getElementById('divThree').style.visibility='hidden'",3500);
var timer7=setTimeout("fadeRevealDivs()",3500);
}
/script
/head
body
form
input type="button" value="Start the JavaScript" onclick="fadeRevealDivs()" /
/form
div style="visibility:hidden">Statement 1 /div
div style="visibility:hidden">Statement 2 /div
div style="visibility:hidden">Statement 3 /div
/body
/html



here's an updated example doing what you want with the fades. it is here:
ww.demetri-media.com/FlashTalker/java2.html

once again, it is just javascript within Dreamweaver.

just click the 'Start the fade" button to start that loop. it is using a fade/toggle from code found here:
http://www.switchonthecode.com/tutorials/javascript-tutorial-simple-fade-an...
combined with the logic i created for the previous example.

all the code is on the html page - you can view the source code from you browser to see it

i feel lke i am beginning to get a grip on this. it is certainly giving me lots of ideas
( this doesn't mean i am not still peeved at mr jeves for forcing me to learn new languages....)

heres what seems like a real helpful Tweening engine' for javascript . i look forward to exploring it:
http://jstween.blogspot.com/2007/01/javascript-motion-tween.html
it seems like it is trying to approach greensock's amazing tweening engine for actionscript. that would help a lot through this ugly migration process......

thank you very much.

so what, in your opinion, is the (or an) answer to animation in an Apple (iPhone) world? Is there some kind of Apple develpment application?

totally confused now<<<

...jim

Jim Milina
Little River Media