Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Animation on the iPhone

teh iPhones

While the iPhone has it's limitations as a mobile device, Apple's App Store helped move the mobile computing market of "smart-phones" towards its goal of being a desktop rival. We can see this as desktop coders move away from the desktop and into the clouds (the internets) while mobile coders are moving from the cloud towards the device.

Apple's iPhone SDK, a toolkit for the high-level language Objective-C, is among the best mobile SDK's because of the range of access and control it provides to the iPhone OS 3.0. Apple knows it's on the brink of a revolution. It also knows that the real movement comes from the masses. The App store now has more than 25,000 apps available to download, almost all of which were developed by a 3-party (read: someone other than Apple and it's partners). The secret sauce to Apple's success, which now overwhelms the iTunes success story, is in the relationship it has with its developers.

teh Flipbook

Animation hits the big time. That's right folks: Need to animate 999 frames for the next few weeks but you want to be able to do it with your fingers on a 3.5" diagonal wide-screen? Well, "There's an app for that." Flipbook for the iPhone lets you do that with layering, onion skinning, and custom frame rate speeds. Creator Josh Anon wrote this app on his spare time, most likely at night with a cape and mask on. During the day he works as the Technical Director at Pixar. He's worked on such films as Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille. He's also a renowned Photographer and OSX developer.

Flipbook sells for $10 on the App Store also comes with a showcase website where users can share up to ten of their films on flipbook.tv as well as participate in contests. The site also hosts help and instructions on how to use Flipbook.


Flipbook for the iPhone: link
Flipbook's website and gallery: link