Designing time-dependent styles
In this recipe, we will use the animation_datetime() function, which is exposed by Time Manager to create a time-dependent style for our animation. The style will represent the age of the event feature: the event marker's fill color will fade towards gray the older the event gets.
Getting ready
To follow this recipe, please load ACLED_africa_fatalities_dec2013.shp and configure Time Manager, as shown in the Exploring spatiotemporal vector data using Time Manager recipe, with the following exception: when adding the layer to Time Manager, set the End time value to the FOREVER attribute.
How to do it…
To create a time-dependent style, we use the Data defined properties option of the Simple marker:
In the Exploring spatiotemporal vector data using Time Manager recipe, we mentioned that we already used the FATALITIES attribute to scale the marker size. For the time-dependent style, we will add a new definition to the Fill color property, as shown in the following screenshot...
