Frame Animator is a highly polished, professional frame-by-frame vector animation studio app built with Jetpack Compose and modern Material Design 3. It provides a complete sandbox for creators to sketch, organize, and export layered vector animations with synchronized audio tracks.
- Pro Drawing Canvas: Supports multi-layer vector sketching with responsive stroke rendering, custom brush styles (Pen, Pencil, Brush, Airbrush, Eraser), and dynamic pressure-sensitivity options.
- Onion Skinning: Visually guides your transitions by projecting configurable before/after frames with customizable opacity.
- Timeline & Layer Management: Full multi-frame timeline navigation (play, pause, step forward, step backward) and layer depth controls (Background, Middle, Foreground) with independent visibility toggles.
- Audio Track Synchronization: Record vocal snippets, sound effects, or import audio files to play back and animate precisely on cue.
- Export Formats: Seamlessly export your hand-drawn masterpieces to high-fidelity Animated GIFs, HD Video MP4s, or structured Layer Vectors (JSON).
- Cloud Synchronization: Instantly synchronize vector coordinates and asset streams with secure cloud databases for cross-device backups.
- The Issue: The app previously experienced massive APK bloat and compile timeouts due to dependency on the heavy
androidx.compose.material.icons.extendedpackage. - The Solution: We completely replaced the external icons library with a hand-drawn, high-performance Canvas-based custom rendering system inside
AppIcons.kt. Icons likeADD,DELETE,PLAY_ARROW,PAUSE,SETTINGS, andCREATEare rendered directly via vector mathematical operations, slashing compilation overhead and keeping the app extremely lightweight.
- The Issue: Potential early-lifecycle application crashes during startup can be difficult to diagnose without direct developer access to device consoles or active USB debug bridges.
- The Solution:
- Early Intervention: Created
MyApplication(the root application initializer) which intercepts the system lifecycle before any activity or main thread UI gets rendered. - Early-Intercept Uncaught Exception Handler: Built
CrashHandler.ktto monitor all global background and UI thread crashes. - Direct Local Filesystem Log Writing: When a crash is intercepted, the handler outputs an ultra-detailed
crash_log.txtfile containing the timestamp, app metadata, full stack trace, hardware manufacturer, device model, and Android OS version. - Dual-Storage Logging: Saves to:
- Internal Storage:
context.filesDir/crash_log.txt(private and secure) - External Android Data Directory:
context.getExternalFilesDir(null)/crash_log.txt(directly accessible via computer USB connection or native File Manager apps underAndroid/data/com.aistudio.flipacraft.nxhkqp/files/).
- Internal Storage:
- Early Intervention: Created
- The Upgrade: Redesigned the main dashboard with a gorgeous, high-fidelity tabbed interface featuring Projects and Clips lists, an interactive floating navigation bar, and bento-styled cards.
- Top Center Floating Brush Control Bar: Quick selection of active drawing tools (Brushes, Eraser, Lasso, Paint Bucket, and Text Overlay tools) packed in an elegant semi-transparent floating horizontal glass bar with a drag handle symbol.
- Center End Floating Vertical Controls: Side-docked capsule containing quick active brush size text (px), active color swatch display with modal settings trigger, and ruler guide trigger buttons.
- Bento-Styled Timeline & Controls:
- Frame Timeline Aligned Above: Smoothly scrolled horizontal LazyRow listing beautiful thumbnail frame badges displaying the frame index, active selected frame indicator, and a custom red circular notification badge showing active frames.
- Frame Add with Plus View: Quick, high-contrast dashed-border button for instant frame creation directly adjacent to the timeline.
- Lower Action Bar: Beautiful bento row carrying audio sync, undo/redo, copy/paste shortcuts, and active layers stack counts.
- Active Ruler Guides (Line, Circle, Box, Mirror):
- Real-time snapping: Automatically snaps drawing paths to lines, perfect circles, rectangles, or mirrors across a vertical axis.
- Interactive Guides: Direct drag-and-drop support for shifting the origin center of circle/box guides, and live pinching/dragging to adjust sizing.
- Lock/Unlock Option: High-contrast active bar below the canvas allowing creators to lock ruler positioning in place to focus entirely on tracing strokes.
- Clipboard Copy-Paste Engine: Integrated local clipboard buffers allowing users to copy complete vector path data from any layer/frame and paste them instantly across frames to fast-track repetitive frame edits.
- Interactive Theme Settings: Fully integrated settings panel enabling creators to switch between high-contrast light theme, eye-safe slate-dark theme, or follow system configuration.
- Custom Background Engine: Creators can now select from 14 background canvas textures and presets on project creation, including:
- Solid colors: White, Black, Gray, Cream, Blue, Green, Pink.
- Interactive textures: Ruled school paper, grid lines, dot grids, sketch patterns, brown Kraft cardboard, and blackboard Chalk green.
- All background swatches feature miniature vector representations drawn live in the creation dialog to preview their look before building!
- Widescreen & Cinematic Canvas Presets: Selectable aspect ratios including:
- YouTube (16:9 Landscape): 1920 x 1080, perfect for widescreen cartoons.
- Instagram (1:1 Square): 1080 x 1080, optimized for social media posts.
- TikTok / Shorts (9:16 Vertical): 1080 x 1920, tailored for mobile viewers.
- Standard (4:3 Retro): 1440 x 1080, classic traditional cartoon canvas.
- Preloaded "Cat Jump" Demo: Pre-populates the workspace on launch with a gorgeous 3-frame jumping cat vector animation. Users can tap it, hit play, and inspect real vector paths immediately!
To inspect or download crash logs directly from a phone or emulator:
- Via USB / PC File Explorer:
- Connect your device and navigate to:
Internal Storage/Android/data/com.aistudio.flipacraft.nxhkqp/files/crash_log.txt
- Connect your device and navigate to:
- Via On-Device File Manager:
- Open your favorite File Manager app.
- Navigate to
Android -> data -> com.aistudio.flipacraft.nxhkqp -> files -> crash_log.txt.
- Via App Sandbox (Rooted / ADB):
- View internal reports at:
/data/data/com.aistudio.flipacraft.nxhkqp/files/crash_log.txt
- View internal reports at:
- Jetpack Compose: 100% declarative modern UI, tailored around Material Design 3 guidelines with elegant dark slate color palettes (
0xFF0F172A). - MVVM Architecture: Separates the rich timeline, recording, and vector editing state in a lifecycle-aware
AnimationViewModelto keep UI composables completely stateless and testable. - Kotlin Coroutines & Flow: Drives asynchronous onion skin compositing, frame export background tasks, and seamless real-time audio playback states.