Interface

The Timeline is where most of the animation magic happens in Linearity Move.

Project Timeline view

The default view in the Timeline is called the Project view, which shows you an overview of all the scenes in your project. From here, you can control the order of your scenes, as well as the transitions between them. You can change the order of your scenes by clicking on a scene and dragging it to a new location. You can also copy and paste scenes to duplicate them.

Each scene has a title. This can be changed in the Scene view, or in the Animation tab in the Project view.

Transitions

Between each scene is a transition, represented by the square with an icon.

Each transition can be edited by clicking on it and opening the Animation tab in the Inspector. There are three transition types, each represented by a different icon.

• Instant transitions are the default option. With this option, there will be no effect between scenes.
• This option will have the next scene fade in from the previous one. You can control both the timing of the fade in, as well as the duration.
• This option will have the next scene push the previous one away. You can control the direction of the push, as well as the timing and the duration.

Scene Timeline view

In the Scene view, you can edit each scene with more detail. You can open the Scene view by double-clicking on one of your scenes, or by clicking the “Edit Scene” button at the bottom of the canvas while you have a scene selected.

Layers panel

On the left side of the Scene view, you can access the Layers panel. It works identically to the Layers panel in Linearity Curve. Here, you can see all the elements within the scene you are currently editing. Groups of objects appear as folders. Each object has a default name, which can be edited by double-clicking on it.

Objects that are higher in the Layers panel will be displayed on top of objects that are lower in the layers panel. You can change the order of these layers by clicking and dragging, or by using the Forward and Backward commands in the top Toolbar.

Timeline

The timeline is where your animations live. Here you can create new animations and edit existing ones. You can navigate the timeline by scrolling up and down (if you have enough elements in your scene) and by scrolling left or right. There are several different elements you can find here:

The snapshot images along the top of the timeline are called Stacks. There are two different types:

• Scene stack: Contains all animations in a scene.
• Animation stack: a collection of multiple property animations visualized as one “stack”.

For example, in the image here we can see that there are currently two different animations affecting this Cover Image element, a rotation change and an opacity change. Both are contained within one animation stack, visualized as an orange bar.

Keyframes

Keyframes are the start and endpoints of your animations. They always come in pairs, known as a keyframe pair. You can move these around by clicking and dragging them.

Animate mode and Design mode

Linearity Move has two modes inside the Scene view; Animate mode and Design mode.

In Animate mode, creating a new element (shapes, lines, text, etc.) or editing an element’s properties (fill color, size, position, rotation, etc.) will automatically create new keyframes in the Timeline. This lets you animate objects simply by moving them on your canvas, or changing their properties.

But in Design mode, creating a new element or editing an element’s properties will apply those changes to the entire project. If you change the color of a circle from green to purple in Design mode, it will be changed to purple across the whole animation, in all scenes.

You can easily switch between Animate mode and Design mode by clicking on the Animate/Design toggle in the top left of the Timeline.