#Animation Manager for Xaml#

Animation Manager is designed to animate xaml controls in a very very easy way. These animations work the same way on both Windows 8 as well as Windows Phone 8.

There are a number of pain points when animating Xaml controls.

• If it ain't easy, it ain't gonna get done
• It is more often just left out as not seen as unimportant
• There is no design language for animation (Windows 8 has made a good start). You are most often given images straight out of Photoshop
• Animations can start behind the splash screen and are often missed.
• MVVM implementations often complicate the separation of view and model. View models make animation difficult. MVCB may be a better approach.

Animation Manager attempts to address some of these issues.

• Simple is best, but drop down to the next level to do something more powerful

There are three different approaches to using the Animation Manager.

• Declarative in XAML (Triggered animations)
• Call built in animations from code
• Define your own animations

The simplest way to animate xaml elements is to declare it in the xaml. Just declare the animation trigger and which animation you want to do. There are three triggers for declaring animations

• When a page loads
• When a page closes
• When idling

Here is an example of animating a button

<Button Content="Hello, World" >
	<bam:AnimationTrigger.Open>
	    <bam:BounceInUpAnimation Delay="0.3"/>
    </bam:AnimationTrigger.Open>
	<bam:AnimationTrigger.Idle>
	    <bam:PulseAnimation Duration="4.0"/>
    </bam:AnimationTrigger.Idle>
	<bam:AnimationTrigger.Close>
	    <bam:BounceOutUpAnimation/>
    </bam:AnimationTrigger.Close>
</Button>

The default animations are simple and quick and quickly add to the polish of an app. For the above button, it will bounce in when the screen is loaded, slowly pulsate while the screen is displayed, then bounce out as the screen closes.

Here is an example of animating a ListBox. The cool thing here is you can use ANY predefined animation to animate items in. Or if you are inspired, you can define your own animation.

<Page.Resources>
	<bam:FadeInUpAnimation x:Key="ListBoxAnimation1" Delay="0.03" Duration="0.3" Distance="150" />
</Page.Resources>

<ListBox ItemsSource="{Binding ExperimentTitleList}" 
	bam:ListAnimation.LoadItem="{StaticResource ListBoxAnimation1}" 
    bam:ListAnimation.LoadItemDelay="0.1" />

Animations do not start until the splash screen has been dismissed.

Navigating in and out of pages can be a pain if you want to make it pretty. You want your animations to finish before navigating away from current screen. Calling the following will call all the AnimationTrigger.Close animations.

await AnimationTrigger.AnimateClose()

This is not yet automatic and planned for a future release.

Lots of cool page transitions.

async rocks for animation. This next bit of code awaits for all animations to finish, before navigating to the next screen.

private async void HelloButton_OnClick(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    await Task.WhenAll(
        AnimationTrigger.AnimateClose(),
        HelloButton.AnimateAsync(new FlipAnimation()),
        HelloButton.AnimateAsync(new BounceOutDownAnimation()),
        SponsorText.AnimateAsync(new LightSpeedOutLeftAnimation())
    );

    NavigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/MenuPage.xaml", UriKind.Relative));
}

For those control freaks out there, there is also great control over animations

var sb = new Storyboard();
var a1 = grid.AnimateProperty<DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames>(AnimationProperty.TranslateX)
         .AddEasingKeyFrame(0, 0)
         .AddEasingKeyFrame(0.3, -90)
         .AddEasingKeyFrame(0.6, 0, new CubicEase { EasingMode = EasingMode.EaseOut});
sb.Children.Add(a1);
sb.Completed += (s, a) => { };
sb.Begin();

Just a few more features thrown in.

Animation Manager includes an AnimatedImage control so your can use SpriteSheets to animate images.

Animate individual characters in the AnimatingTextBlock control. Create some awesome effects.

Register animations with the AnimationManager control. This will allow you to Pause or stop any registered storyboards. Very useful when you have lots going on in a screen.

A Panning Background. Create a parallax effect by having multiple panning backgrounds.