Overview
The product is a tool for producing highly compressed vector graphics movies for mobile devices.
It relies on an extremely small Java player downloaded along with movie data into a wireless
device.
Movies can be created in the following formats
- As an Applet which will run in a normal internet browser such as IE or Netscape.
- As an i-appli which will run in a DoCoMo i-mode compliant cell phone (503i or 504i).
- As a Midlet which will run on a device which supports Sun's J2ME MIDP specification.
The Java graphics programs created can render static images but their real strength is to
display an animated movie sequence of frames with various shapes, text, colors, images and sound
along with user interaction, providing a much richer end user experience. Each target device uses it's
own 'player' to run the movie, however the movie is edited as a single
'.csm' movie file by the editor.
The different device players handle the differing capabilites of the device they run on.
A movie consists of a number of layers. Some types of layer are visible, some are not.
All visible layers are the same size. That size is variable and is the desired target screen size.
Each visible layer can have on it a number of objects which can appear at any location on a layer.
An object can be any one of the following:
- A polyline or polygon. Polygons can be filled or empty
- Multiline text drawn in a specified font
- An image (GIFs for iappli's, PNG for midlets, GIF & JPEG for applets)
Associated with all layers there is a timeline which is of a specified number of steps.
Each step covers a specified length of time. For each step there can be one event which
can be one of the following:
- The layer is shown with a specific displacement or offset
- The layer is hidden
- The layer moves from the current offset to a new offset
It is important to understand the idea that a visible layer can have a specified offset at
any given time. If a layer has an offset then all the objects in that layer will also have
that same offset. The offset can be in any direction (up,down,left,right or combinations)
and may mean that all the objects in the layer are out of view.
The editor is designed to allow the creation of layers and their objects as well
as to be able to create the appropriate events on the timeline which will yield the
desired animation. Once the movie has been created a single button push will
create the applet, iappli, midlet ready for uploading to a website. The programs produced
all reside in JAR files which are compressed files, similar to Zip files.