Template development

AquaSoft Vision and Stages offer many opportunities to develop Intelligent templates. Unfortunately, you can not just turn any animation with a simple click into a reusable template.

Basically, the procedure looks like this:

• A template consists of a user interface (GUI) and the actual animation.
• A script that is appended to the GUI, transfers the settings from the GUI to the animation.

User interface

There are two different types of user interfaces in Vision and Stages.

Settings dialog

One dialog with input fields and controls, etc. is described here: GUI API

What can not be achieved through such a dialog, for example, is the insertion of any number of images.

Timeline GUI

To have a template get placeholders for inserting individual or any number of images/texts/videos, it is assembled in the Timeline from Blackbox objects, Image and Text objects. Via the "Developer" tab on the Properties panel you can prevent that important parts of the template are accidentally deleted or moved. In addition, you can use other settings that tell SlideShow/Stages how the template works.

Config tags

Each object can get any number of config tags. Config tags are name-value pairs that can be evaluated either by the Slideshow/Stages program or scripts.

• e.g. strings Zeichenketten (without quotes)

  Food = Pizza
  

• or numbers (decimal separator is always the dot ".")

  Value = 23.7
  

• Multiple config tags are separated by a semicolon ";"

  Food = Pizza; Value = 23.7
  

• A special form of subordinated values is possible

  Rectangle.Width = 0.3; Rectangle.Height = 0.7;
  

If subordinate values are used, it is not possible to use the main name again without . (i.e., Rectangle = <Value>).

Standard config tags

There are a few predefined tags that have special meaning in the program.