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Re: Basic animation
Responding to the OP - you should be able to animate a more complex shape - merged and grouped. What you cannot animate is sub-object features (e.g. control points) and unsupported effects.
Try these steps:
New animation
Create complex shape
Select all and group (if necessary)
Name object
Copy frame
Adjust scale, colour, rotation on copied frame
Repeat "copy frame and adjust" ad nausea
Play animation
My guess is that somehow the name is lost between frames of your animation - hence the jumping. If you plan your animation and only copy frames then the tweening of scale, rotation and colour should all work.
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Re: Basic animation
you haven't mentioned transparency changes... and as I recall these don't work for a group tween.... but that said, yes, jumping, is likely a naming problem I'd agree
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Re: Basic animation
Because Adobe Systems bought the swf technology when they acquired Macromedia (who bought the technology from a small start-up company), they have their "rules" as to what animation types for certain objects can and cannot be done.
And Xara's animation engine is based around SWF standards, regardless of whether you export to GIF, swf, or AVI. When you "break a rule", such as changing a gradient from frame to frame, Xara lets you know (sort of) that it's ceased to be a supported tweening object and it will be written as a key frame that doesn't tween with the following frame but rather just sits there for its allotted duration and hence some animations are large, and look a little choppy.
If you want to do tweening Xara-style (and Adobe style), I wrote a long list of what you can and cannot expect from a Xara animation
here a while back. Scroll down to the "Read Me First" section—the text is live so you can copy it to a local document and refer to it in the future.
My Best,
Gary