Cartoon animation works great on Surface Pro

I showed my 9 year old son a cool drawing program called Physamajig, in which users can draw objects, which behave like real physical objects, including reacting to gravity, friction, and bounce. He was having fun with it on my Surface RT and it reminded me of another program.

Years ago (around 1981) when I had to write my own mouse driver by programming the RS-232 serial port I wrote a cartoon animation program in C and assembly code. Back then most folks had no idea about computer graphics, so I was invited to display my cartoon program at the Honolulu Academy of Arts for a week, at an exhibit focusing on art in technology. The program allows the user to draw frames of a cartoon, and then it calculates the “in-between” frames to make smooth animation.

Over the years, I rewrote this cartoon program in various languages, and even published it (it comes with Visual FoxPro as a sample). FoxPro runs on the Surface Pro too.

The source code can be found here: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/calvin_hsia/archive/2009/01/29/9383609.aspx

I logged into my Surface Pro, I just cut/paste the code into a new Visual Studio 2012 VB->WPF App. I had to rename “Window1” to “MainWindow”, after which it just worked.

It was really cool to see it work with the touch and pen input capabilities of the Surface Pro. In fact, Visual Studio runs really fast on the SP: the SSD Hard drive is much faster than a physical hard disk: see Performance of Memory vs Disk 

I’m also using Window Live Writer on the Surface Pro to write this blog entry

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• Anonymous
  November 08, 2013
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