Trident is the next evolutionary step of the animation layer that drives the animations in applications powered by Substance look-and-feel. The underlying animation engine has been in development and production use over the last two years, but the API was heavily oriented towards the UI delegates in custom look-and-feels. One of main goals of Trident is to preserve the power, performance and expressiveness of the existing animation engine, while at the same time providing a set of simpler APIs for use in application code.

The first drop of source code, build scripts and the runtime library are available in the download area and in the SVN, and in the next few weeks expect more polishing of the API, additional examples and documentation. For now, allow me to leave you with two demo videos that follow Chet’s examples from the next version of Flex: