General question about Animation Engine (and more)

[Lars Brehmer]

I was wondering about animation engine.

I am making an iPad app, which seems to function very well if a tiny bit slow, which is acceptable. The exception is moving groups or images. I am assuming that with the added liveCode engine and everything liveCode entails, liveCode apps will always be a little bit slower than native Xcode apps. Which for my app is fine. But with the retina display, some image files are quite large, and move grp "a" from w,x to y,z is extremely slow and very jerky at best. I am now trying visual effect "wipe up/down/left/right" and it is much better, really smooth in fact. But I do like the sliding movement better, so will want to try it again in the future. My question is this;

Can animation engine accomplish this? Smooth, fast movement of a group containing a fairly large image? If not, with large images, how about small ones, because I have those too. I have downloaded AE, knowing full well that scripting it is beyond my skills. I searched for hours for tutorials and/or example stacks and found nothing. In the live code forum, people have mentioned AE tutorials by Malte Brill. Someone said it was included in the AE download, but I don't have it, and where it is mentioned, there is never a link. I looked on the derbrill website and couldn't find it there either. There is only one simple thing I would like to do with AE (no collision detection, no moving multiple objects etc) I just want to move an object along a simple path, resize it while in motion and maybe rotate it a bit. Deleting an eMail on the iPad has pretty much the effect I am looking for. I think if a had a sample stack with such an animation, I could play with the path, size, speed, rotation parameters to achieve what I want. Anyone know of such a stack or tutorial?

Now to the "more"

A couple of code lines I took straight from the liveCode dictionary don't work for me (yet), so I must (as usual;-) be missing something

1. set the beepSound to "system" - I never get a beep on my iPad, which certainly has a beep in the systen settings! (this is in the openStack 	   handler)

2. iPhoneSetKeyboardReturnKey "done" or mobileSetKeyboardReturnKey "done"  -  I only ever see the default return key.
    iPhoneSetKeyboardType "numeric" or mobileSetKeyboardType "numeric"  -  I only ever see the default alphabet keyboard.

These two are in scripts a few lines before the keyboard is activated, like the dictionary says, but no joy.

Some of you may remember I was trying to have groups slide up with the keyboard. While I have not got that to work, I do know by testing that the "on keyboardActivated" handler functions as expected. But the "on keyboardDeactivated" handler does nothing (yet.) I tested this by;

on keyboardActivated 
  put "something" into fld "test" 
end keyboardActivated

and then

on keyboardDeactivated
--put "nothing" into fld "test"  - the "something" showed up, but the "nothing" did not!
end keyboardDeactivated

For now I have given up on the sliding together thing, replacing it with visual effects or in some cases just repositioning a group just before or after keyboard activation. Not my first choice but it looks pretty good. However in one single case I need keyboardDeactivated in case the "keyboard down" button on the bottom right of the keyboard is touched while the group in question is at its keyboard activated position. 

What am I doing wrong?

Cheers,

Lars