Does anyone know how this "snap" activity is created?

[Brandie Boback]

I just found an amazing Geography activity on the SMART Exchange and I'm wondering how it was created. This activity has a US map as a background and the 50 states are simply objects in a pile at the bottom.  When the states are put near their correct position, they "snap" into place.  Can anyone give me step by step direction on how to recreate this activity?

Here is a link to get to the lesson:

http://exchange.smarttech.com/details.html?id=83b43e77-38c3-46ca-9b...

Thanks so much!!!

[Troy Reynolds]

There is no step-by-step to this project. Go to the "Gallery" item in SMART Notebook and search for "US" Under the "Notebook Files and Pages" look for "USA-states" and insert it into your page. After you have the page inserted go up to "Pictures" and find all of the states and insert it into the same page. Once you have all of the states move them into position. If they get close to the outline they will automatically snap into place. Hope this helps. Good luck.

[Brandie Boback]

Thanks Troy.  Is there a way to make this happen with any other objects?  I'd like to create some other pages for students that will "snap" objects into place.  Any ideas?

[Troy Reynolds]

It seems like if you insert a page with a picture in the background into a SMART Notebook slide then the corresponding parts of the picture will lock into place. I'm attaching a few examples. The first slide is the US slide we talked about. The second slide I tried to get a bear to snap behind the trees and the only way I could make it happen was to turn on the "alignment lines" and "snap to grid" and change the color of the grid to white. The last example was an "eighth" page. Find the corresponding piece of the puzzle the snaps into place. The quarter and third will snap into place but it won't fit nicely into an eighth. Hope this helps.

[Brandie Boback]

Very Helpful Troy!  Thank you!

[Amanda Myton]

I saw this posted over on the SMART Exchange, so I thought I'd just copy Bradey's answer over here in case others wanted to know what he found:

Hi Brandie,

As promised here is what I found out.  The gallery items used to create that file were created a long time ago, so the information we have available is rather limited.  There is some hidden code in both the grey map of the US, and each colored state that has been inserted into the file.  This code was either added manually or it was added using a custom development build of Notebook during file creation.  If the 'snap' was added using a custom development build of Notebook, it was only a one time thing, as the 'snap' feature is no longer accessible.  That being said there is not much I can offer as far as help goes.  I can however, encourage you submit a feature request to [e-mail] to have this added in the future.  I am sure many users would be interested in having this ability when creating files.  I think it is quite slick and can see many uses for it.  Sorry I couldn't help you further.

Bradey