7- A Unique Approach
To enhance the unique features of your application, consider using custom animations.
Here's a cheerful, bright, and restaurant-app-appropriate example:
How to Implement Animations in a Mobile App
Let's discuss how to create and implement animations in your app.
We'll explore the most popular animation tools.
Custom Solutions
This involves designing animations from scratch. This is often the best option, as it provides a truly unique solution.
In practice, we frequently encounter the need to develop custom animations of various types.
However, custom development has drawbacks:
1- It's more complex, requiring more time to implement your ideas.
2- It's more expensive. The time and complexity of development lead to higher costs.
Therefore, if your financial and time resources allow for a custom solution, you can create animations from scratch without ready-made libraries. Otherwise, consider the next option…
Ready-Made Solutions
Google and Apple provide essential components for creating top-notch animations, addressing the needs of mobile app developers. Numerous resources exist where developers share their experiences and achievements (libraries, plugins, etc.), the most popular being GitHub.
From a budgetary perspective, using personalized animations may not be the most efficient; ready-made animations are often a better choice.
Several challenges exist. The main one is the uncertainty of whether a specific library perfectly suits your needs. Future improvements might also require working with someone else's code.
However, these problems are solvable.
In summary: there's an 80-90% chance you'll find the necessary library for animation creation. The question is the quality of the solution.
We recommend exploring several open-source libraries, comparing their differences, and identifying the best fit for your specific needs. You can also combine the best aspects of different solutions to design a new, custom animation.
If you're seriously considering animation design, read the following sections describing some popular Android and iOS tools.
UI Animation Tools in iOS
Let's explore iOS animation tools.
1- Hero
If you need to create non-standard transitions between controllers, the Hero library is useful.
It's a suitable animation tool for iOS developers. We've used it in several projects, and it's high-quality and consistently supported and improved. Therefore, it's a recommended library for app animation.
Its advantages:
- Excellent quality;
- Simplicity (easy to implement in your project);
- High speed.
2- UIViewPropertyAnimator
While not the newest method for adding various animations (it's been around since 2016), some developers still overlook this class.
The UIViewPropertyAnimator class allows:
- Creating interactive animations controlled by the user.
- Reversing animations.
- Modifying existing app animations.
- Playing animations in reverse.
- Adjusting animation speed (UICubicTimingParameters).
UIViewPropertyAnimator functions based on two protocols:
1.1. UIViewAnimating - enabling:
· Playing animations;
· Pausing or stopping them;
· Retrieving current status or position.
1.2. A protocol inherited from UIViewAnimating.
UIViewImplicitlyAnimating provides additional features, including resuming iOS animations after pausing and reconfiguring their speed.
3- UIKit Dynamics
Consider using UIKit Dynamics, another iOS animation tool.
UIKit Dynamics is a physics engine built into UIKit. Once a dream, it's a reality since iOS 7. It simulates the effects of external forces and natural phenomena on mobile app objects – how objects react to gravity or friction.
With proper development, users perceive a realistic, living world where objects react naturally to their environment.
In short, UIKit Dynamics is key to achieving stunning, realistic animation effects. See the examples below:
