Motion Composer for the Mac is a great application for your Mac that allows you to create engaging animations and interactive content for any platform in HTML 5 or Flash without writing any code. The animations you create will work on desktops, phones or tablets. The animations you create have an ‘inner intelligence” that once created, detect if the device you are using has Flash. If it does, it uses it, and if it doesn’t it uses HTML5. Pretty cool.
What I like BEST about Motion Composer is that it allows to embed really cool animation in iBooks Author easily. If you are working with iBooks Author I highly recommend this application.
You can use objects, pictures, text, video, and sound with Motion Composer and it will wrap them all together. I really liked the ability to drop and drag content from iTunes. Once you content is dropped onto the initial slide you can move it around to the different state you want within the time frame. So, if I drop text onto the slide I have a starting position and then I move it to a secondary position. On playback Motion composer will show the progress from the first to second position.
You can create a text box button for the user to click. You program this button to perform an animation or activate some action.
You can test your animations out which is very handy.
Like advanced Keynote users, you can place elements off the viewing area of the slide and have them move into view on the animation. There are lots of great features and some advanced functions.
There’s a new operating system on its way from Apple and it is called Mountain Lion. Forget that Lion is just six months old and you might not even have installed it or mastered all of its features. Mountain Lion is on the way. Mountain Lion has some great, great, great features available for you and your classroom.
