M2-Task 2 (Comparison of other animation formats)

Animation Formats

Dynamic HTML

This allows scripting languages to change variables in a web page's language, which could effect the look of

"static" HTML page content, after the page has loaded completely. this is an add-on to HTML and can easily be changed by the coding administrator, this was specifically made for the admins to make changes and add effects to a webpage more easily for example roll-over text and moving text effects

Flash

Flash animation is a type of vector animation software used to create animation clips. Flash also manipulates raster graphics to provide animation of text, drawings, and still images. It allows bidirectional streaming of audio and video, and it can capture user input via mouse, keyboard, microphone and camera. Flash applications and animations can be programmed using the object-oriented language called ActionScript (3.0 is the current one we use). Adobe Flash Professional is the most popular and user-friendly authoring tool for creating the Flash content, which also allows automation via the JavaScript Flash language (JSFL)

Shock wave

This format allows the user/admin of the page to add an animation effect or GIF file to a webpage, which allowed adobe to publish their own applications and allow users to see and use them assuming they have the shockwave 'plug-in' installed

QuickTime

QuickTime is a format crated and devloped by Apple inc, capable of handling picture, sound, video, panoramic images and interactivity. there are many different versiosn on QuickTime player, and the more classic first edition is available on windows XP, and now QuickTime is really only developed and used by Apple and the latest version is QuickTime X

Real player

RealPlayer, formerly Real One Player, is a cross-platform software product created by Real Networks  used for playing recorded media. The media player is compatible with numerous formats within the multimedia region, including MP3, MPEG-4, QuickTime, Windows Media, and multiple versions of RealAudio and Real Video formats. RealPlayer is also available for other operating systems (OS) and Linux, Unix, Palm OS, Windows Mobile and Symbian versions have been released. The software is powered by an open source media engine called Helix.

Silverlight

Microsoft Silverlight is an application framework for writing and running rich Internet applications, with features very similar to Adobe Flash. The run-time environment for Silverlight is available as a plug-in for web browsers running under Microsoft Windows and OS X. While early versions of Silverlight focused on streaming media, current versions support multimedia, graphics, and animation, and give developers support for CLI languages and development tools. Silverlight is also one of the two application development platforms for Windows Phone, but web pages which use Silverlight cannot run on the Windows Phone or Windows Mobile versions of Internet Explorer, as there is no Silverlight plug-in for Internet Explorer on those platforms.