Remember flip books? Get a stack of paper and draw something on the first page. On the next page, draw just about the same thing moved slightly, repeat until you run out of paper. Staple the pile together, flip through the pages and if you did it right, your drawings move like an animated cartoon. That, in a few words, is the basis of movement in all animation and motion pictures. When you go to the movies, the projector displays 24 frames per second giving the illusion of movement.

Flip books used to come in Cracker Jack boxes, be sold in stores, and steal hundreds of hours of kids lives who were taken with the idea and who made lots and lots of them. I was one of those kids.

Well, there's an app for that. Cartoon Creator [iTunes link] is a fun app that makes flip books on your iPhone or iPod touch running OS 3.0 or later. Choose a pen and a color and go to work. Draw something on page, click the empty face button and an overlay drops over your first page allowing you to see what you did but also letting you draw a slightly moved version. Wash, rinse and repeat until you have a full animation that will play back at any speed you determine.

The app has some very nice options, like three different pens, each with a thinner or thicker line, lots of colors to choose from, and a bunch of cartoonish sounds that you can attribute to any page. If you are creating an animation of a brick being thrown through a window, why not assign a glass breaking sound to the page where the brick hits the glass?

In addition, and this is something near and dear to my heart, it does anaglyph 3D, (red and cyan) with the appropriate glasses. This works remarkably well. The app gives you the ability to draw on three planes. Along with regular drawing that appears on the plane of the screen, you can draw behind the screen and in front of the screen as well. After digging out my anaglyph glasses, I found this to be some of the best anaglyph 3D I remember seeing. The image is sharp, clear and very dimensional.

This is a really nice app, and a great introduction to animation and 3D. It would be perfect for kids. My flip book period took most of my ninth year. It would also be great if you can actually draw. I have absolutely no talent in this area.

When you run the app, you are presented with a an uninviting lined screen titled 'Cartoons.' Big detriment there, but the web site provides full instructions on how to use the app. This is a problem I've seen with many apps. Load it and then what? At the very least having a link to the site would be a help.

Another problem with the app is that you can't delete anything but a particular page. If you are a screw-up like me and want to delete an entire animation, you can't. Any time you start an animation, an entry named Untitled appears and you can't get rid of it. That may not seem like much of an oversight to someone who can draw, but it's me reviewing this app and a delete option would get more use than anything else.

These two slights are minor and I'm sure can, and hopefully will, be fixed in a an update. As it stands now, it's a fun app, does great 3D, can waste countless hours and might even teach kids about animation.

At $.99US it's worth the money and at the same time you'll get to feel good about yourself when you think of all the trees you're saving.

New nightly builds of Safari's bleeding-edge doppelgänger, WebKit, are getting some new support for CSS animations -- support that's already available in MobileSafari.

The animations, which include a falling leaves effect, a way to simply animate objects sliding across the screen, and a "pulse" effect (described as "the new <blink>") are all supported by WebKit. The WebKit blog shows code examples about how to use these behaviors in your own sites.

MacRumors's Arnold Kim suggests that Apple may be looking to obviate the need for Flash on the iPhone and iPod touch through the implementation of web tools like CSS Animation. I would argue that while CSS is powerful, getting Flash on the iPhone is about one thing and one thing only: Games.

Just when you thought you'd seen all the weather apps you needed to see for the iPhone or iPod touch comes another release today with one very nice feature -- animation.

Looking quite a bit like the weather screen on the HTC Diamond Touch, AniWeather [App Store link] animates the clouds, snow, sun and rain graphic making your current conditions a bit more compelling on screen than the static shot that most other weather apps provide. In fact, it seems the worse the weather, the more interesting the animation.

It is hard to describe the effect in a static image, so here is a link to a video showing AniWeather in all its pixel-moving glory. Sunny days aren't too interesting, but as the weather deteriorates the animations improve. I particularly liked the windshield wiper that leaves smudges just like the real ones.

AniWeather allows you to look up all the weather stations in the U.S. and, unlike the built in Apple weather app, can use the GPS on the iPhone to give you the weather at your current location (U.S. locations only, sadly). You can enter in multiple sites, and use your finger to swipe up and down to change them, which takes a moment to get used to as the Apple app uses a side-to-side swipe.

There isn't a lot of info beyond the basic in this app. No radar, no videos and no detail like wind speed or humidity that other apps like The Weather Channel [App Store link] or WeatherBug [App Store link] provide. Also, those apps are free while AniWeather is $.99 U.S.

On the other hand, AniWeather puts pretty pictures on screen and it might make you smile, even if the weather outside doesn't.

Josh Anon's $9.99 FlipBook [App Store link] offers a well-designed animation building tool. Like other flip book drawing products, it lets you create movement frame by frame. What makes FlipBook stand out from the crowd of iPhone drawing tools is its fine attention to interface details and the addition of the flipbook.tv sharing site for the animations you create.

Read on for TUAW's take on this new AppStore offering, and see the gallery below for some screenshots of the delightful interface.

Just a few short days after the new season started on Adult Swim, the latest episode of The Venture Bros. is now in iTunes for your downloading pleasure. I love this show, and this season will probably be the best yet -- show creators Jackson Publick (a.k.a. Christopher McCullogh) and Doc Hammer (no alias, that's what they call him) seem like they're going to dive full steam ahead into the huge backstory of this series (originally a spoof on the old Johnny Quest cartoons, but lately a play on everything from James Bond to Hunter S. Thompson), and it'll definitely be a wacky, hilarious ride.

Unfortunately, there's no season pass for the series -- maybe Apple is a little leery to give those out considering what happened earlier this year (and let's be honest, as awesome as this show is, it's crazy enough to have been a few episodes away from cancellation since it started -- God bless the folks at Adult Swim for letting it go as long as it has).

If you haven't seen this show yet, the best place to start is probably back in Season 1 (Careers in Science is probably the easiest place to start, for my money), but if you want to follow along in this latest season, the show's just an iTunes URL away.

[via TUAW alum D. Chartier]

Mac OS X Hints has posted several ways to disable Finder animations like the snap-to-grid animation and the Info window opening animation. They are:

1. Disable standard Finder animations.
defaults write com.apple.finder DisableAllAnimations -bool true

2. Disable 'snap to grid'.
defaults Write com.apple.Finder AnimateSnapToGrid -bool FALSE

3. Disable Info pane animations
defaults write com.apple.finder AnimateInfoPanes -bool false

4. Disable slow-mo animations (seen when you press Shift during Exposé launches or window minimization)
defaults write com.apple.finder FXEnableSlowAnimation -bool true

Issue any or all of these at the command line, and then restart Finder. (Enter killall "Finder" at the command line.) To reverse these effects, change from true to false or false to true and restart Finder again. So did this make my creaky 733 G4 Power PC Mac run faster? Perhaps a little. The biggest changes in speed I noticed were in accessing folders from the dock.

Maybe I shouldn't be admitting this publicly, but I'm a big fan of South Park. So I was pleased to see the latest Apple Pro Profile is about the South Park Studios and their use of Macs. The construction paper feel is produced with Photoshop and Maya on 30 Power Mac G5s, with the final product requiring Motion, Shake, and some other software packages as well. Then the heavy lifting is done by a 120 AMD processor Linux render farm. One neat tidbit: by working nearly around the clock, they manage to push out each episode the day it airs on Comedy Central, with an entire episode being produced in only 6 days. It's an interesting look behind a fun show. Check out the complete profile on Apple's Pro site.

[Via Digg]

The Nicktoons Network has added some content to the iTunes Store. Skyland, set in the year 2251 on an Earth that has been shattered into million pieces, and the Nicktoons Network Animation Festival. The Festival features seven episodes of animation from around the world including South Africa, Chine and the Philippines.

Each episode costs $1.99 though you can get the first episode of Skyland completely gratis, for a limited time.

[via iLounge]

We don't know how legit this is, or whether there's an Apple Store out there actually using this, but it appears as though some Apple Store employees have created a ProCare promotional video in the spirit of South Park. It features short, animated kids in a few quick scenarios of customers entering the store and requesting Procare support, as well as another customer pimping some of the various features that ProCare offers, such as personalized support and training. It probably won't make the Apple.com homepage any time soon, but it's an interesting effort from some enthusiastic employees (who probably didn't even get paid for their efforts).