Adding animations to a single object

HelpXplain is the exciting new animated infographics and screencast tool that integrates with Help+Manual.

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Ga Bowen
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Adding animations to a single object

Unread post by Ga Bowen »

Can you add more than one animation to a single object?
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Tim Green
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Re: Adding animations to a single object

Unread post by Tim Green »

Ga Bowen wrote:Can you add more than one animation to a single object?
Not at the moment, although that is planned for the future. However, there is a trick you can use to apply two animations to an object. This is possible because object groups and individual objects can have separate animations. So what you do is add an animation to the single object, then group it with another object (which could be hidden behind other objects) and add the second animation to the group.
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Ga Bowen
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Re: Adding animations to a single object

Unread post by Ga Bowen »

That works great, thank-you. :)
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Martin Wynne
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Re: Adding animations to a single object

Unread post by Martin Wynne »

Tim Green wrote:However, there is a trick you can use to apply two animations to an object.
Hi Tim,

Many, many thanks for that nudge to the grey cells. I've finally got what I've been wanting all along. A cursor which moves, pauses, and then clicks. That's going to halve my number of slides and Xplain creation time.

I nested (not grouped, otherwise it won't chain from the previous slide) a clicking cursor inside a moving cursor. For the nested cursor I created a blank .ico file and inserted it as a custom cursor. That way the two cursors can be offset, otherwise it is difficult to select the parent (without going to the object list).

I keep all this stuff in a dummy.xplain file in a second instance of HX, and copy and paste when needed.

Great! At long last I feel I'm on my way!

Just like H&M, you can do anything in HX with a few bits of Meccano. :)

cheers,

Martin.
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Tim Green
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Re: Adding animations to a single object

Unread post by Tim Green »

Martin Wynne wrote:Just like H&M, you can do anything in HX with a few bits of Meccano. :)
Here's another one before the weekend: When you are using HX as an Impict replacement you need a way to change the pixel dimensions of the slide with all its contents, because that defines the size with which HM inserts it as a static image. What you need to do is this:
  1. Select the slide and define the dimensions you want in the slide properties pane.
  2. In the Objects list, select all the objects with CTRL+Click and SHIFT+Click (much easier than SHIFT+Click in the editor), which creates a temporary group as long as they are selected. You can also use Group to hold them together more reliably if you want.
  3. Use the Size menu to resize the entire group to fit the slide.
  4. Then, if necessary, use the Size menu again to fit the slide to the resized objects so that there are no empty bits.
If you don't use the grouping trick it's a lot harder to scale everything into the slide borders.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Martin Wynne
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Re: Adding animations to a single object

Unread post by Martin Wynne »

Thanks Tim, I noticed that if multiple items are selected, they are all scaled when changing the size.

One of the best bits of Meccano in HX is the HTML editor. It means you can put anything in an Xplain -- web pages, YouTube videos, feedback forms. Even embed one Xplain inside another -- I can see that being extremely useful.

I know Alexander is a bit nervous about folks messing up the page HTML with the editor, but surely it's at the users own risk if editing the HTML? In H&M there is full access to the page templates, with plenty of ways to mess things up there. :)

cheers,

Martin.
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