Simple Animator

The Internet is full of multimedia content, and animations to enhance pages, or better explain a new headline. What’s more, modern computer programs make it easy to create them from scratch using quite the variety of resources. For instance, Simple Animator allows you to load pictures to set up a frame-by-frame animation in an intuitive process.

Because of the methods used in the development process, the application requires .NET Framework to be installed on your computer, even though chances are it’s already there, since it’s a default feature in modern Windows iterations.

The workspace at your disposal is divided into three tabs so you don’t feel overwhelmed. The center area is where all parts, and frames are combined, and in most cases the mouse is enough to interact with components you add. Main resources consist of picture files, which can be under formats like BMP, JPG, PNG, TIFF, and GIF, but the latter format is stripped of animation.

Sure enough, adding resources is easy enough, but disappointment starts kicking in shortly after. The initial workspace is incredibly small, but there’s a dedicated option under the tools menu you can use to set the width, and height of the canvas. Only then can you properly control inserted objects.

Unfortunately, there’s no navigation panel to easily select project resources. Even though a simple selection is enough to place a target in focus, working without a list of resource gets difficult when a large quantity of objects are involved.

Creating frames is a little less frustrating. Down in the Animation Designer tab the last stance of the Parts Designer is copied as a new frame. Switching back to the designer to adjust animation motion is a must, with transformation options for translation, rotation, scale, or origin.

The last of the three tabs is the preview section, with an editable field for playback speed. However, it’s all fun and games until you try to export the project, since there’s no actual animated format in the set of export options. As such, you can only save frames either as BMP, or PNG.

Bottom line is that animations can be created out of just about anything, and given the right set of tools, effort is minimum as well. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly the case with Simple Animator, not necessarily because of the ambiguous design method, but rather because of the lack of proper export format options.