Fade In and Out on Mobile

[Sannyasin Brahmanathaswami]

This is a both a plea to the universe and hope that there are solutions already that I have not discovered.

Fading in and out is probably the number one most request effect our design team wants to see in the process of creating opening motion + title graphics on video. it's also the thing you see most in professional movie credits. When some young designer tries to do some special effect, it usually comes off very "hokey" and our editors say, "Duh! that just looks silly, can't we just do a fade in?"

We have something that "kinda" works in LC on the desktop -- dissolve  -- though I have to see anything as smooth as we can get if you run fades in webkit with JS or just have them in a video.

But apparently we have no cross platform option on Mobile devices. I do see some cool effects in iOS apps, but I suspect they are calling apple specific core graphic effects… I really don't know.

Animation Engine has an interesting method for morphing fillGradients, but using a very crude approach, not because Malte's work is crude, but because it's the only path: incrementing the gradient ramp RGB values by +1 or -1 integer overtime with send in.

OK, so you will ask "what exactly do you want to do? "

So right now what I would love to do is have a simple radial gradient with a white center and a single color on the ramp for the exterior for a graphic that is centered on the card. Lock the screen, reset the gradient to something more complex with many points on the ramp from the 12 color tertiary color wheel, change the "via" so that it shifts angle and then reveal that slowly with an unlock screen + fade in.  But this is not available on Mobile…

So currently we are using the send over time to change blend level… that works pretty well.
but I'm not sure how to use that to cross face through a lock and unlock scenario so that we don't drop out to fully transparent before showing the next view…. Is that our only option? What do you do?

Aside: I don't get it: how is it that these kinds of things can work inside web kit on both Android and iOS, but not in LC?

Old Rant: LC graphic rendering is sooo far behind the real world….I keep saying this year after year… but we just get more "business innovation" (ala the recent survey on "do you want LC integration with WordPress or Microsoft office)  when what LC really needs, if it wants to get out in front of the current wave of HTML5 IDE development kits, is, IMHO -- to ramp up it's graphics/visual production values so that LC can stay relevant in a 21st century media world. Am I the only one who feels this way? sorry, I just have to get this off my chest periodically…

OK back to work on gradient ramps…