Animated Canvas Released to PLaneT

I've released the animated canvas that I use for animated graphics in PLT Scheme. An animated canvas uses two bitmaps to provide a double-buffered animation capability. This is implemented by a new class animated-canvas% that specializes the canvas% class. At any specific time, one bitmap, the background bitmap, is being used for all drawing operations and the other bitmap, the foreground bitmap, is being used to paint the canvas.

The swap-bitmaps method is used to swap the background and foreground bitmaps. When the bitmaps are swapped, the contents of the new foreground bitmap – the old background bitmap – is displayed on the canvas. The new background bitmap – the old foreground bitmap – is automatically cleared, unless specifically prevented by the 'no-autoclear style option.

The device context returned by the animated canvases’s get-dc method is the device context of the background bitmap. This value is not valid across calls to swap-bitmaps. Therefore, it is important to re-retrieve, via get-dc, the device context across bitmap swaps.

The animated canvas also supports resizing on the canvas, which automatically resizes the background buffer after the bitmaps are swapped.

A simple example using the animated canvas is also provided.

As usual, the package is available from PLaneT using the form:

(require (planet williams/animated-canvas/animated-canvas))

The source code is maintained on the Schematics subversion repository at SourceForce.