New "Animation" Style

In addition to the tooltip functionality that was added to GeoMedia as part of a recent hotfix, Intergraph has also added the ability to animate graphic styles. So, yes, this means that you can finally have the city points in the US Sample geoworkspace flash from red to green to blue!

To try the new style option for yourself

1) Bring up the Legend Entry Properties dialog by double-clicking on a legend entry

2) Push the Properties button

3) This should bring up the Style Properties dialog

4) On the far right hand side of the style toolbar is a new button named Animate Style (highlighted in yellow in the screen shot below). Push the button.

5) This will bring up the Animate Style dialog box

Here is where you can create different rules to animate your style via an expression (functional attribute), simply at a certain time, or when the graphic is displayed.

6) Now to get into the rules of the animation (frames, colors, etc.) click on the Advanced tab which should bring up the following dialog:

7) Here you can control the different attributes of the style like color, size, etc. So when you click on the animation (far right hand column above) it will let you create frames and each frame can have properties, etc.

Look here to see my animation

In the end, you can get fairly advanced with different elements changing differently depending on different rules. Very powerful.

Now, the dying question…where’s the value? I can see it being quite useful when trying to highlight different areas of interest during a query, etc. Or it might even be pretty cool when working with thematics. I would think this would eventaully be integrated into GeoMedia WebMap and GeoMedia WebMap Publisher.

I encourage anybody to post their own ideas on different possible uses….

Until tomorrow