ConfPad

Writing high-quality path morphing animations for Android is a near impossible task. In order to morph one shape into another, the SVG paths describing the two must be compatible with each other — that is, they need to have the same number and type of drawing commands. Unfortunately, popular design tools, such as Sketch and Illustrator, do not take this into account. As a result, engineers will often have to spend time tweaking the raw SVG's given to them by designers before they can be morphed. To address this issue, I built a web app called Shape Shifter, a tool that helps developers create path morphing animations for their Android apps. In this talk, I'll explain how to use Shape Shifter to create transitions between arbitrary shapes using AnimatedVectorDrawables. I will also explain how Shape Shifter internally uses bioinformatics algorithms to auto-generate morphing animations between incompatible shapes, as well as some of the challenges I faced while building the tool.