The simple diagram/animation on the left was created with iSee with as little as 50 lines of code. It would require considerably more to do the same using XAML storyboards, C# coding and a fair knowledge of animation and databinding. iSee doesn't restrict yourself to diagrams however, see the online demo here for more UI sugar. Besides being a powerful fluent API, iSee is also great fun to use and to prototype with.
iSee is an innovative API for Silverlight which focuses on Silverlight's animation capabilities but which allows at the same time much more than just animating visual elements. iSee is a fluent API which allows you to chain changes in position, rotation, scale and perspective but also bind elements together and hence allows you to create diagrams with ease.
With iSee you can create with ease new ways to display elements, create dynamic menu's, visualize things with just a few lines of code and create flashy animations by simply attaching intuitive methods to a canvas.
For example, the following line of code:
Attach(image, true).Scale(3, 3, Duration.Automatic) .Move(new Point(145,150)).Scale(0.3, 0.3, Duration.Automatic).Play();will attach a given image to a canvas, scale it with a factor of three, subsequently move the image to another location and un-scale it to the original proportions. Easy! It would take a substantial amount of work to code this in C# or to create an equivalent storyboard in Expression Blend. In a way, iSee wraps a lot of typical patterns, including dragging elements on the canvas and creating bound connection lines between visuals. iSee contains many, many methods which makes it easy for you to create things without understanding the inner-workings of animations in Silverlight. The fluent mechanism in addition allows you to chain together an unlimited amount of animations, your imagination is the limit.
Because The Orbifold is all about diagramming we have invested considerable effort to also enable diagramming scenario's. iSee can however not be compared to our other diagramming products L2 and Graphite. iSee has no grand architecture like L2, no big patterns like MVC or MVVM, it doesn't contain complex layout logarithms or flexible data exchange namespaces. If you are looking for a solid architecture and high-end features then L2 is the way to go. If you are looking for click-and-go layout the Graphite is your solutions. iSee on the other hand extends your existing architecture and relies on your existing data models; iSee has no notion of serialization and data exchange. Still, some other mechanism are in iSee as much as in our other products: everything is based on templating, styling and databinding. You can change the visual appearance of whatever you wish to animate, you can databind and rely on all the other wonderful Silverlight methods. In fact, iSee assumes very little about entities, everything is based on the FrameworkElement, meaning that as good as anything can be animated via iSee. Indeed, most elements of WPF or Silverlight have their root through the FrameworkElement.
- Fluent API; chain animations like a story
- Support for diagramming; focus on visualizations
- For Silverlight and WPF (in preparation)
- Includes many samples; see our online demo
- Works with any FrameworkElement; you can re-use your existing controls, iSee wraps around them
- Easy to use and well documented; we love quality and documentation
- Comes with source code and support; we care