Best 2D animation library/tech for "iPhone" style animation on WIN32?

Question

All,

I have built a nifty demo application that displays data about our internal systems as a full-screen "billboard" style display. You could think of this as something like an application displaying the national deficit - rapidly increasing numbers, animating very quickly, all day.

The problem is that the demo works really well and the client would like me to build an industrial strength version!

I'd like to do this in C++ but it could be Java or maybe C# (though I'd prefer not to use C#, as I'm not so strong in that env).

I'm toying with SDL or Allegro, but I have no experience in either, so I'm open to the best (and ideally easiest) toolkit out there.

When I say "iPhone"-style, I mean simple but elegant transitions between panels. The iPhone makes exellent use of slides, fades and blends. My app doesn't need to do any 3D style animations. In terms of graphics, I really only need simple things: 90% text, some images, and simple primitives like lines, rectangles and gradient fills.

Of course, I could implement this in "plain old" DirectDraw or OpenGL, but I really don't want to think about writing timer classes and choosing timing methods for animation - some toolkit out there should be just right for this.

Thanks for any help!

RF

Answer 1

Qt has support for SVG and easy to use animations. (apart from being a great all-around cross-platform GUI framework)

Answer 2

The Windows Presentation Foundation (or WPF) is the first thing that came to mind reading your question. From what I've seen it's Microsoft's answer to the slick UI that all of Apple's products are dripping with. Everything is DirectX accelerated, making for very smooth transitions and animations.

As far as I know only the .Net languages support WPF (with a heavy emphasis on C#), so that may be a downside in your case. If you find that it doesn't suit your needs, then I also recommend QT as a very nice C++ framework. Just be sure to check out the licensing first to make sure it meets your needs.

Answer 3

SDL is an excellent toolkit to work with. If you already understand the principles of "plain old DirectDraw or OpenGL," you should have no trouble with SDL. I haven't seen every graphics framework out there, but of the ones I have seen, I'd definitely recommend SDL. It's designed by experienced game programmers who know what they're doing because they've been there and done that, and it's interface is very intuitive. And unlike WPF, it's designed from the ground up for cross-platform compatibility.

Answer 4

I would give Processing a spin. "Ease of maintenance" could overcome the C++ requisite. I know many designers that love to tinker with it.

Answer 5

I think you are looking for the Clutter Toolkit. It's free, cool, and multi-platform. Works on top of OpenGL by implementing all those timers and stuff you can't be arsed to implement yourself, and wrapping them on a very convenient and awesome API.

http://clutter-project.org/