Most of the menus and tools in Motion are similar to other Apple software. This is because there are people who specialize in user interface design and when they find something that works, it works even better if it is used consistently. The Inspector is one of the most important panels in Motion. Let’s take a look a the Inspector controls for a text object.

Menus

Regular and popup menus allow you to choose from a list of values. A good example of this is the Font menu, which lists all the available fonts and a preview of what the font will look like. By passing your cursor over a font name in the menu list, the selected text on the Canvas will change to preview that font. Parameters that have menu controls cannot be keyframed for animation.

Radio Buttons/Icons

Radio buttons work in groups of values, allowing you to select only one in the group. For example, the Alignment parameter has seven icons that act as radio buttons. Clicking one icon deselects all other icons. Radio buttons cannot be keyframed for animation.

Sliders

This is a familiar control that is in many software and allows you to set the value to a parameter/characteristic within a range of numbers or percentage. When we use a slider control for the Size parameter of our text, we have three options. We can use the slider handle to set the size within the range for that font. Secondly the number to the right of the slider reflects the position of the slider within a range and we can change this number by two methods. Drag your cursor over the number and to the left to lower the value and to the right to raise it. Using the Option key will change the value in increments and double-clicking on the number gives you a blinking cursor for typing a number value.

Sometimes you will encounter more than one slider for a parameter. For example, the Scale parameter has one slider visible by default. However, you will see a small triangle to the left of the slider because there are two hidden sliders. Open the triangle to see a different slider for the X and Y Scale values. Using the Y slider will allow you to make the text taller but the width will remain the same. Using the X slider will widen the text but the height will remain the same. As you would expect, using the first Scale slider alone will scale both the height and width of the text.

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