Script Animation Tool For Mac
Why, when people were trying to get me to switch from Windows to a Mac, did no one tell me about AppleScript?
Sure, a stable OS with Unix shell access and a sophisticated UI are nice. But a scripting language that lets me automate tedious tasks and hike my creativity-to-boredom ratio? How come I never heard about that?
'It's the hidden secret,' said Sal Soghoian, co-author of Apple Training Series: AppleScript 1-2-3 and Apple's product manager for automation technology. He added that it rarely gets talked about.
AppleScript's appeal is that it can control both your operating system and your applications, easily passing information among them. Soghoian estimates that four out of five 'top-tier' Apple customers use AppleScript for serious automation -- his examples include The New York Times generating daily stock charts and software developers testing applications. Even Microsoft uses it, he says (for work on developing Office for Macintosh).
Core Animator is an amazing animation tool that empowers you to do motion graphics in intuitive new ways. Begun on the desktop, as a 5 star Mac app, it is now also available on iOS. Core Animator for iOS brings the power of professional animation directly into your hands, in a way that has never been done before. Out the box Microsoft Outlook for Mac 2011 has no equivalent tool to the auto archive functionality found in Outlook for Windows. UPDATE: I have now released a new tool for archiving in Outlook Mac 2011 which is a native Mac Application. Essential tools for riggers and character animators, may of them free Forrest – whose own free BoolieMan rig for Maya we covered on CG Channel a few years ago – confines himself purely to animation tools, so modellers and texture artists should probably look elsewhere.
But AppleScript is also well suited for the desktop. You can use it to set your system to boot up with certain apps open in a particular way, right down to the size, location and content of each window. You can batch process files, rename and resize multiple images, or fetch Web pages and manipulate the results. You can connect to network servers and even create a simple database.
After a few months on a Mac, I wrote a script that copies data from a weekly report I get as a PDF, and formats it for insertion into a spreadsheet. This saves a boatload of tedious cutting and pasting. Another script pulls data out of our Web analytics tool and formats it for our home page 'popular right now' box. Another one reads a text document and inserts the article information into proper fields of our content management system, saving more cut-and-paste operations.
It's also extremely easy to share AppleScripts with colleagues who use Macs -- a bit more elegant than, say, trying to share Perl scripts with Windows users who don't have Perl (and the required add-on modules) already installed.
While other languages offer some similar capabilities to AppleScript, 'there's simply nothing like it in Windows,' declares David Pogue in his book Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Leopard Edition. 'It's a programming language that's both very simple and very powerful, because it lets Mac programs send instructions or data to each other.' And it does so using commands that are closer to plain English than most other scripting options.
A few caveats
AppleScript's use of (relatively) natural language for its commands is a mixed blessing. While it's popular among non-IT power users, even Soghoian admits that the syntax can frustrate those who regularly work in a language like Perl or Java. I lost count of how many errors I got because I'd write something like 'x = 4' instead of the AppleScript-approved 'set x to 4.' And I don't program full time.
Although I've become an AppleScript enthusiast, I will caution that 'natural language' doesn't always mean 'intuitive and easy.' While there are usually multiple ways to express something in AppleScript, quite a number of other syntaxes that might make sense won't work in a script. The 'nouns' and 'verbs' to script specific applications can be hard to ferret out and apply properly, even after perusing the appropriate app 'dictionary' (a listing of that application's scriptable objects and methods). So some patience (and checking out others' code) is needed.
Fortunately, though, some highly scriptable applications allow you to record activities in the AppleScript editor, very much like a macro recorder which translates your actions into (editable) AppleScript commands. This was very handy when I couldn't figure out on my own the proper AppleScript for TextWrangler's search and replace. For example, I use this AppleScript snippet to delete all percentages in a report that are formatted with a space followed by one or two digits followed by a period followed by one digit followed by a percent sign -- as in 5.3% or 23.8%:
Mac Animation Free
<!--begin code-->tell application 'TextWrangler' to replace 'sd{1,2}.d%' using ' searching in text 1 of text document 1 options {search mode:grep, starting at top:true, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false}<!--end code-->
A final warning: AppleScript is not particularly well suited for a lot of text manipulation. There's no built-in support for regular expressions; there's not even a simple search-and-replace function as part of core AppleScript.
Part 1
1. Toon Boom Animate ProFeatures and Functions:
· This is the firstfree animation software for Macunder this list. The toon boom animate pro is a Canadian software company that specializes in the production and storyboarding software.
· The software can be used for the storyboarding for television, web, films, mobile phones, animation, games etc.
· The software can be used by a variety of people whether they are professionals working in the animation field or whether they are aspiring students who eventually want to placed somewhere in the animation world.
Pros of toon boom animate pro.
· The software has a centralized databa_x_se system and is extensively used in the film and animation industry. The databa_x_se is quite efficient and it also allows the animators to use the software with least difficulty.
· Thisfree animation software for Maccan be used easily by the beginners.
· It has almost all the opus features and can be easily used for cutout animation style. The software has tools that can be used to draw textures with pencil; it has the morphing tools, deformation tool, particles, built-in compositor, 2D or 3D integration.
Cons of toon boom animate pro.
· There are no online tutorials for some of the versions.
· It loads very slowly even on higher RAM
· Non-NVidia chipsets are not supported by thisfree animation software for Mac.
User Reviews:
· PLE edition very limited. -http://animation.about.com/od/softwarereviews/gr/tbanimatereview.htm
·Toon Boom is next on my shopping list of mindbogglingly expensive software tools for starving artists. -http://www.awn.com/forum/thread/1014088
Animation Tools Free Download
·Used to use 'Animo' back in the day, and ToonBoom reminds me a lot of that, since it has tools for detecting line weight in scanned art, formulating colour regions etc. It seems to be built specifically for 2d character animation - either scanned or drawn directly. -http://www.awn.com/forum/thread/1014088
Animation Maker For Mac
Screenshot: