Saola Animate

Nowadays web content is pretty cool and interactive, with lots of fresh animations along the way. More than this, design tools got perfected over the years, now requiring little to no coding knowledge. For instance, Saola Animate is a powerful application with which you can create neat interactive HTML5 animations.

In terms of visual layout, the application is structured much like a video editor. The center area is the canvas, with a timeline editor at the bottom of the window, a side panel for management of scenes, another for resource browsing and object properties adjustment, as well as the upper toolbar fitted with the necessary controls and functions.

The great effort on your behalf is to come up with a neat idea because the application helps you easily put it in practice. There are a lot of object types you can include in the animation. As such, your creations can be made up of rectangles, ellipses, HTML widgets, images, audio files, videos, symbols, as well as a whole variety of shapes.

Editing can quickly become thorough, with an abundance of parameters to configure. Found in a side panel, options allow you to adjust general object parameters, position and size, transformation effects, fill, border, and even text related configurations.

You start off in a blank scene, which represents your canvas. You can set the size specifications to whatever suits your project. Multiple scenes can be added, and layer support makes sure you don’t feel overwhelmed when working with too many objects and elements. The canvas itself can be fitted with a grid, to which objects can be snapped for accuracy in designs.

The timeline editor is intuitive overall. Each object you add gets included in the timeline. In case you don’t want to take the time to manually place keyframes, there’s an automated function which simply allows you to change the time and properties of an object, with the change being marked as a keyframe to produce animations.

For more complex tasks, you can access the event handler. It functions as a general rule or for a selected object. Actions can be defined here for a variety of events, such as single or double-click operations, play and pause, mouse movement, focus, swipe, and more. No coding is required here, but only names and values to define, which you can then preview in the canvas.

A preview can be started at the press of a button for the entire animation or a custom selection. You can have the default browser brought up to play the animation so you can view it in its native environment. When it comes to exporting, however, you can only build the project as HTML5. It would have been useful to save the animation for offline use as well.

Saola Animate is a powerful application in which only your imagination is the limit. You can work with a stunning array of objects and thoroughly configure visual styles and animations for each. The auto-keyframe feature is sure to help out, while event handlers can be created for complex, interactive animations.