sofia.graphics

Provides low-level graphical components like colors, shape primitives for creating and adding shapes directly to the screen using a canvas-based model, and animation.

Shapes

This package provides an object-oriented model for drawing shapes on the screen. The ShapeView provides a canvas where objects that extend Shape can be added and removed, and the visuals on the screen are automatically updated whenever shapes are manipulated.

Sofia provides a number of shape classes that you can begin using right away:

• LineShape
• RectangleShape
• OvalShape
• sofia.graphics.ImageShape
• sofia.graphics.SVGShape (for nicely scaled SVG vector art)
• TextShape
• sofia.graphics.CompositeShape (to create shapes composed of other shapes and manipulate them as single entities)

You can use these shape classes directly or extend them to add your own capabilities. For example, in a game you might extend sofia.graphics.ImageShape to create a few classes that represent different playable and non-playable entities in the game.

Animation

All shapes have an animate(long) method that allow you to construct animations that will run in the background. This method takes the duration of the animation in milliseconds as an argument (so an animation that runs for 1 second would pass in 1000). It returns an Shape.Animator object (or an Animator nested inside the Shape subclass being animated) with several methods that can be chained together to indicate which properties should be animated.

These animations are interpolating animations, meaning that they operate by considering two values – the value of a shape property at the beginning of an animation and the desired value of the same property at the end of the animation – and interpolates the intermediate values of that property to make the shape appear to animate. Consider the following example:

     shape.setColor(Color.black);
     shape.animate(1000).color(Color.red).play();

In this case a shape starts out black and animates to red over a duration of 1 second. This would cause the shape to "fade in", starting dark and getting brighter until the duration has passed.

Motion can also be achieved in these animations:

     shape.setColor(Color.black);
     shape.animate(1000).position(10, 40).play();

Events

To be written.