Animation

Creating a “Page Turning” Effect in Blend – Boredom Challenge Day 29

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Animations, when done properly, are a guaranteed way of increasing the visual appeal of an app. In my previous blog posts, we’ve seen how we can make simple animations in Blend, and later we’ve seen how we can combine these simple animations to make a card flip effect. So, contiuning on in this trend, I’ve set my eyes on the another such frequently used and nice-looking effect: Turning a page.

If you look at the card flip effect example, you can see that we can actually use it for turning a page by changing the center of rotation of the objects. However, this will result in stiff looking rectangle pages which lack the curvy edges of a real page. So, how can we turn that page more realistically?

Unfortunately, we can't make it look as good as this. At least, not easily.

Unfortunately, we can’t make it look as good as this. At least, not easily.

It is not possible to create an effect in Blend like shown in the screenshot. You can, however, create such an effect in code, using bezier curves and whatnot. But it looks quite complicated, and I’ve seen people suggesting to use Direct2D instead of creating such animations in code. Also, while searching, I’ve come across some code examples or custom user controls but they were generally for WPF (I’ve only found one custom control for WinRT, and it wasn’t free).

So our best bet would be animating curves in codebehind, or learning Direct2D. Unfortunately, ain’t nobody got time for that.

If you are muttering to yourself “But.. but, I just wanted to turn a simple page, nothing fancy!”, then you are at the right place. We can play around in Blend a little to make it “sort of” curvy and look just like shown in the video below:

In this article, we’ll create an example app which will have a book where the user can turn the pages with the animation shown above.

➤ Here I am, on the road again.. There I am, up on the stage..

Creating a “Card Flip” Effect with Blend – Boredom Challenge Day 27

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In one of my previous blog posts I’ve talked about how we can make simple animations in Blend and shown how we can move stuff around in our interface. However, our animations would need to be a lot better than moving several elements around or spinning them in order to be visually appealing.

And one of the most widely used effects is, of course, flipping something onscreen like a card. This effect not only looks good, but also can be used as a nice transition animation between several elements in your page. And it is really easy to implement by using Blend. Here are the videos of the example app we will make (source code is at the bottom of the page :)):

My computer is a bit old, so it caused some stuttering when saving the videos. The animations are quite smooth in the app. 🙂

So, if this has grabbed your attention, read on and we will create the example app shown in the videos above.

➤ Bonus points for shouting “I activate my trap card!”

Making Simple Animations with Blend in Windows Store Apps

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When making an application, using animations is a good way to impress the user and make your application look better. Either for making a more lively menu with sliding buttons or adding some visual effects to the background, animations come as a very simple yet powerful tool for good looking applications. In this article we will be developing a Windows Store application that contains several different animations which show several different features.

I will explain how animations work as we build our application, so we will start with opening up Visual Studio and creating a new Windows Store app.

1

In the MainPage.xaml, add a button which will be used to start the animation.

    <Grid Background="{StaticResource ApplicationPageBackgroundThemeBrush}">
        <Button x:Name="startAnimationButton" Content="Let the show begin" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="100,100,0,0" VerticalAlignment="Top"/>
    </Grid>

Then, right-click MainPage.xaml and select “Open in Blend”.

2

➤ Let’s see what we can make with animations…