The commands control the speed of the animation, and some basic functions. To begin with, the Timeline is made up of two distinct parts: the layers upon which an element can be animated in time, and the Timeline’s commands along the top. If you’ve worked in Flash or Director you’ll recognize some of the features of the Timeline Inspector. Alternatively, you can select SHFT+F9 (Windows) or CMD+F9 (Macintosh). Open the Timeline Inspector by selecting Window - Timelines. Now let’s work with the Timeline Inspector, the core manager for animation. If you want to include HTML in a layer, it can be animated too. Anything you add to a layer can be animated, whether it’s text, images, plugins, forms or tables. This provides the basic setup for any animation. With the layer now named correctly, drag the text of your company name into the layer. It’s worthwhile to give your own name to a layer, so next, change the name of the layer in the Layers’ Property Inspector to "CompanyLogo". The name for a layer is very important, as it’s used as the reference point from which all animations will be created. Each name is alphanumeric and contains no spaces. You will find that if a second layer is added, the new layer will be called "Layer 2" and a third will be called "Layer3".
By default, the layer is called "Layer1". The Properties Inspector changes to reflect the new layer’s properties. Select Insert - Layer, which will immediately add a rectangular layer to the page.
For any animation to work, the content that’s being animated must be inside a Dreamweaver layer. We want the company name to animate onto the top of the page from the left hand border. We’ll use this to help explain how the various animation tools in Dreamweaver work.īegin by opening a new page in Dreamweaver and type your company name onto the page. The most basic animation moves from one point on the screen to another. Let’s get started - we’ll create a simple animation.