New Kid in Town
FutureSplash mixes the benefits of vector graphics with Shockwave-style interactivity
By Bob Schmitt
April 26, 1996
Until recently, a huge gulf existed between the low-end and high-end of animation and interactivity on the Web. The recent advent of GIF animation has sparked a wave of motion on otherwise static Web pages, but it provides little else beyond animation. Though GIF animation has rudimentary controls, such as frame delay and looping, it lacks even the most basic of interactivity — the ability to stop a looping animation.
In order to add interactivity to their pages, Web developers have had to turn to much more complex technologies such as Macromedia's Shockwave for Director or (gasp!) Java. That's all about to change.
FutureWave, a small San Diego company, has just released FutureSplash — a new Netscape plug-in — and CelAnimator, the authoring program for creating FutureSplash files. From our preliminary look at these programs, FutureSplash will help fill the gap for designers who want to add interactivity to their pages, but don't need the level of programming Shockwave and Java provide, nor the learning curves they present.
Based on its popular Smart Sketch drawing program, which converts freehand drawings into vector curves, Cel Animator takes things a step further by adding timeline-based animation and an easy-to-learn interface for creating interactive buttons. A beta version of Cel Animator is available for both Macintosh (PowerMac and 68K) and Windows 95 and NT.
In our next issue of <TAG> we'll give you a step-by-step guide to creating an animation and interactive buttons with Cel Animator, including how to configure your server for the new MIME-type. But for now, here's an overview of some of FutureSplash's features.
To the vector go the spoils
What makes FutureSplash really stand out is the fact that it's vector-based. Vector graphics, depending on their complexity, tend to be much smaller than bitmap files like GIF and JPEG. More importantly they're resolution-independent, so you can zoom in for detail without losing any quality or clarity. Although several other plug-ins use vector file formats — Macromedia's Shockwave for Freehand, Adobe's Amber, and Tumbleweed Software's Envoy, to name a few — none of them allow the same level of interactivity and nowhere near the level of animation that FutureSplash does.
And though FutureSplash can't compete with the level of programming that Director's Lingo language provides, it does offer one thing that has vexed Shockwave developers from day one: an easy way to target a Netscape frame other than the one the movie is in.
Up, over and down
Buttons can perform a variety of functions in FutureSplash, from moving to a different frame in the animation or going to a new URL, to moving to a specific frame in a new movie at a new URL. Here again, FutureSplash doesn't provide the high-powered interactivity of programming languages like Lingo and Java, but it does enough to get you around, and does it nicely.
Another nice touch is that the cursor automatically changes from a pointer to a hand when the user places the mouse over a button. This built-in feature, that requires no scripting, is consistent across both Windows and Macintosh platforms. This is something that's been another small, but irritating, thorn in the side of many Shockwave developers.
Cel Animator's Timeline and Layers window
Creating buttons in Cel Animator is as simple as creating three separate pieces of art and merging them, using Cel Animator's button editor. Create one illustration for the button in its normal state, one for when the mouse cursor is over the button, and one for when the mouse button is pressed. Up, over and down. Once the art is complete, the button can be quickly assembled in Cel Animator's Timeline and Layers window.
FutureSplash's Action menu — accessible with a right-mouse click in Windows or a Command-click on a Mac — offers the user some excellent controls over the animation. You can zoom in to see fine detail and zoom back out, all at once or in steps. Also included is a toggle to turn anti-aliasing on or off, rewind, fast-forward, and play the animation, and — most important of all for many users — the ability to toggle looping on and off.
And, speaking of looping, once fully downloaded, FutureSplash animations play from RAM, not out of the disk cache. So the most annoying feature of animated GIFs, the endless hard-disk crunching of looping animations, is not an issue with FutureSplash.
This puppy does new tricks and old
The unfortunate reality of plug-ins is that not everybody has them all, and many, when they get them, have a difficult time installing them — especially on the Windows side. I'm in the business of collecting and testing plug-ins, and I can't even keep up with them all. What this means for the Web developer is that for every page designed to rely on plug-in technology, they have to create non-plug-in pages. Well, the engineers and designers at FutureWave have put in a batch of export options in order to simplify the process.
Need a GIF or JPEG of your animation to use as an imagemap on a non-plug-in page? No problem, Cel Animator exports either. Have to create the non-plug-in page, but can't stand the thought of non-plug-in users missing the cool animations you spent hours toiling on? No problem there either. Cel Animator will export your animation as an animated GIF, Windows AVI or QuickTime movie.
Many illustrators and designers have huge investments in learning programs like Macromedia FreeHand and Adobe Illustrator, and might not want to trade in their comfortable programs for the tools in Cel Animator. You can import Illustrator 88 and AutoCAD DXF files as well as GIFs, JPEGs, and Windows BMP files. Illustrator 88 is not an ideal format, though, since it doesn't support many features available to FreeHand and Illustrator 5.0-6.0 users.
Listen...did you see that?
Just like the old joke goes, sounds in FutureSplash will have to be seen and not heard. FutureWave is planning to add sound support to its next version. That's an important part of Web animation, although adding sound will considerably increase file sizes, unless FutureWave's clever engineers can come up with a way to compress them, something Shockwave engineers have been working on for several months now.
FutureSplash isn't the end-all, be-all of animation on the Web, but it does bring quite a bit to the page, filling a much-needed niche between designers and programers.
Copyright © 2012 Robert Schmitt. All rights reserved.