I can't draw.
   Stickmen are hard for me.
   Which is why, to put it bluntly, there are darn few animations on any of my web pages.
   Look, I know the theory: draw something, copy it to a second blank page and re-draw it just a little differently. Repeat. That's how it is done.
   But what if you can't draw at all?
   Wouldn't it be nice if you could use all that clipart you have, all the neat graphic helpers you have in programs like CorelDraw or PhotoShop? Sure it would. But how.
   Enter the Universal Animator from Auto f/x Corp. This is one slick piece of programming. All you have to do is save each version of your drawing to a special Universal Animator printer driver. As you build what you're doing, you keep saving each step and before long, you have an animation.
   The wonderful thing about this is that you don't have to learn a new program – you just use programs (any programs, which is why this one is called Universal Animator) you are familiar with. It works with anything simply because the method of using it is a printer driver. A really innovative idea.
   A simple example will show you how easy this is. Let's say you want to do something real simple like rotate a word around a central axis. Go into CorelDraw, type the word, set the colors and "print" it to the Universal Animator driver. Now, use the rotate function in CorelDraw and rotate 5 degrees counterclockwise. Print that to the driver. Repeat. Repeat again. And again.
   By the time you've moved your word around 360 degrees, you have "saved" a file to the driver that rotates your text. This you then save as an animated GIF file. Plop that on your web page. It is that easy. Real animation.
   If you will just think of all the things you can do with your favorite programs – to text or graphics – and think about saving them in steps. The steps become the animations. In PhotoShop, for instance, you can have a picture and blur it in steps, "printing" it each time. You end up with a picture that slowly (or quickly) goes out of focus. That is rather amazing.
   The program is easy to use. One run-through with the documentation and that's it. Anything you can think of to do with any of the applications you have you can use to make an animation.
   In fact, you'll probably see more of them on my pages in the future.

   Link to the Auto f/x web site