Animations in 5.2

Question

I have to do an activity with students in a laboratory where only Mathematica 5.2 is available .

I would to do some animations, but in 5.2, from what I understand, I should select the series of graphics produced by Animation, or by some other means, and type Ctrl-Y.

Is there some way to automate this process to obtain an animation similar to what is available in later versions of Mathematica?

I am thinking of something like
`Animate[g[ω], {ω, 1, 2}] SelectionMove[EvaluationNotebook[], All, GeneratedCell] SelectionAnimate[EvaluationNotebook[]]` — enzotib, Mar 30 '16 at 20:27
Not an answer, but I personally miss the ease of Ctrl-Y animations. — Chris K, Mar 30 '16 at 20:54
I didn't read your comment, it seems you already have most of what I wrote figured out ... — Szabolcs, Mar 30 '16 at 21:31
I'm truly impressed at the number of people who have copies of V5.2 around to test the answers. — Brett Champion, Mar 31 '16 at 05:02
There's also a documentation page of SelectionAnimate with a useful example, however it doesn't work with Mathematica 10 and I can't tell if it works in 5.2. — shrx, Mar 31 '16 at 07:57

score 8 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 30 '16 at 21:42

I don't have version 5.2, and this type of animation no longer works properly in version 9, which is the oldest version I have installed. So what I show below is only an untested starting point for something more robust. I hope it will be helpful.

animate[frames_] := Module[{},
  Scan[Show, frames];
  SelectionMove[EvaluationNotebook[], Previous, CellGroup];
  FrontEndTokenExecute["OpenCloseGroup"];
  FrontEndTokenExecute["SelectionAnimate"]
]

frames must be a list of graphics, e.g.

frames = Table[
   Graphics[{Circle[{0, 0}, 1], Circle[{Cos[x], Sin[x]}, 1]}, 
    PlotRange -> {{-2, 2}, {-2, 2}}, AspectRatio -> 1], {x, 0, 2 Pi, 2 Pi/20}];

animate[frames]

As I remember in v5.2 Show caused the graphics to be rendered into a new cell, but I may be wrong ... in v6 and later this would be Print, which I used to test this (sort of, my notebook display gets corrupted when I try it in v9/v10 ...)

I added small corrections to make it run correctly (Circle apparently doesn't use defaults in version 5.2). — Jens, Mar 30 '16 at 21:43

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 30 '16 at 23:24

What I did back in the day instead of explicitly loading Graphics`Animation` was to use either of Table[] or Do[], depending on whether I was interested in further exporting the animation to a GIF or not. Since graphics in old Mathematica was a side effect (hence the need for the old DisplayFunction gymnastics), one merely collapsed the set of pictures thus produced, and then double-clicked on the cell group if one wants to see the animation.

Thankfully, this machine I'm using has 5.2, so I can show an example:

an animation in 5.2

Notice the six tiny buttons in the lower left? Those controls show up after double-clicking the group of graphics cells. Most people now might not be able to guess what the second button did: it allowed one to run the animation forwards first, as usual, and then backwards. Nowadays one now has to do something like ListAnimate[Join[#, Reverse[Most[#]]] & @ list] for this.

There's a button on an Animator to toggle play direction. Clicking it three times gives for "forwards-then-backwards" if I remember it correctly. Presumably that corresponds to an Animate option. — b3m2a1, Aug 29 '17 at 00:06

andre314 · Answer 3 · 2016-03-31T04:33:30.267

In his book "The Mathematica Guidebook for Graphics", which was written at the time of Mathematica 5, Michael Trott gives a lot of examples of animations. His technique was to create a separate notebook for each animation and to launch the notebook with :

FrontEndExecute[{
      FrontEnd`NotebookLocate[
   FrontEnd`FileName[{"Animations"}, "2_1_TreeOfPythagoras.nb"]]}]

This assumes that the target notebook is "./Animations/2_1_TreeOfPythagoras.nb"

This code of Trott his hided in the style of the some buttons that permit to a user to launch the animation.

I have not tested this code

Animations in 5.2

3 Answers3

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