Overview

The product is a tool for producing highly compressed vector graphics movies for mobile devices. It relies on an extremely small Java player downloaded along with movie data into a wireless device. Movies can be created in the following formats The Java graphics programs created can render static images but their real strength is to display an animated movie sequence of frames with various shapes, text, colors, images and sound along with user interaction, providing a much richer end user experience. Each target device uses it's own 'player' to run the movie, however the movie is edited as a single '.csm' movie file by the editor. The different device players handle the differing capabilites of the device they run on.

A movie consists of a number of layers. Some types of layer are visible, some are not. All visible layers are the same size. That size is variable and is the desired target screen size. Each visible layer can have on it a number of objects which can appear at any location on a layer. An object can be any one of the following:

Associated with all layers there is a timeline which is of a specified number of steps. Each step covers a specified length of time. For each step there can be one event which can be one of the following: It is important to understand the idea that a visible layer can have a specified offset at any given time. If a layer has an offset then all the objects in that layer will also have that same offset. The offset can be in any direction (up,down,left,right or combinations) and may mean that all the objects in the layer are out of view.

The editor is designed to allow the creation of layers and their objects as well as to be able to create the appropriate events on the timeline which will yield the desired animation. Once the movie has been created a single button push will create the applet, iappli, midlet ready for uploading to a website. The programs produced all reside in JAR files which are compressed files, similar to Zip files.