Introduction

An animation is a sequence of photograms related among them. When they are reproduce sequentially it shows a progression of a scene along the time. As it was explained in the time support paragraph, a layer with time information contains time instants or intervals for each data stored. That permit us to visualize the data selecting a range of time or just an instant. If you reproduce squentially the data ordering this data by time the result is an animation.

To animate layers with temporal information is mandatory to have a configuration dialog in which animation parameters be introduced.

• Animation interval: It is the begin date and the end date of the animation. A dialog should be show all disposable range to select all the interval or just a part.
• Window time: A window time is the range of time visualized in each step, ie, in each tic of the animation bar can be visualized just one instant or an interval of data.
• Time step: It is the amount of time of each step. In each time step a entire window time is visualize. The window time starts in the time step. For instance, an animation of a complete year with a time step of a month and a window time of a week shows the data contained in the first week of each month. This animation will have twelve steps of a week each one.
• Speed of progress: In real time, this is the time of refresh of each step, ie, the animation is reproduced and each step could be each second, each half of second or so. In each time step a window time is visualize
• Loop: Is the number of times that a animation is reproduced

org.gvsig.timesupport.app.animation.extension

This is a gvSIG plugin that adds to the gvSIG views the functionality to create a animation in layers with temporal information. The structure of the animation project has been integrated in org.gvsig.timesupport project.

The extension creates the preferences panel and registers the listener AnimationPreferencesListener to manage events from this panel. This listener creates the AnimationBarPanel when the configuration is finished and creates the AnimationBarListener to manage the events of this panel. Moreover, this is the component which throws the thread to do the task.