Tutorial: Animations

This tutorial shows you how to create the Poem Maker app that's included on the Sample Apps page. The Poem Maker app consists of a button and three notes, and each note has part of a sentence on it. The first note contains an adjective and a noun, the second note contains a verb and an adverb, and the third note contains a preposition and a noun. Together, these notes form a poem, such as "A delightful blackberry grows slowly inside a cloud." When you click the button, the app generates a random poem and animates the transition between the old poem and the new one.

Before you begin

You should have the following things ready:

• The BlackBerry 10 Native SDK
• A device or simulator running BlackBerry 10

You can click here to download the tools that you need and learn how create, build, and run your first Cascades project.

Downloading the full source code

This tutorial uses a step-by-step approach to build the Poem Maker app from scratch. If you want to take a look at the complete source code for the finished app, you can download the entire project and import it into the QNX Momentics IDE. To learn how, see Import an existing project.

Download the full source code

Set up your project

Before we start creating our application, create an empty project in the QNX Momentics IDE, making sure to select the Standard empty project template. If you're not sure how to do this, take a look at Create a new project.

After you finish, a new project appears in the Project Explorer view with the name that you specified. We also need to import the following images:

We also need to import a file called poemgenerator.js, which contains a custom JavaScript function. We'll use this function to generate poem text in our app.

To import images and the poemgenerator.js file into your project:

1. Download the assets.zip file and extract the images folder and poemgenerator.js file.
2. Copy the images folder and poemgenerator.js file.
3. Paste the images folder and poemgenerator.js file into the assets folder of the project that you created.

If you refresh the Project Explorer view, you'll see the images folder and the JavaScript file in the project's folder structure.

Several other files were created automatically when you created your project. In the src folder, you'll see app.cpp, app.hpp, and main.cpp. These C++ source files take care of basic application functions, such as creating the application object, starting the main event loop, and loading a QML file that represents the UI of the application.

In this tutorial, we won't go into the details of these source files. If you want to learn more about what's going on in these files, check out Create your first app.