Rant against beamer's shaky animation support (and solution)

I love LaTeX.

I love it because TeX is a programming language, and the other typesetting products aren't. Other that that, it's a horrible language.

For some reason, I don't follow the "separate presentation from contents" dogma. I guess it must be a bit strange coming from a guy who otherwise strongly advocates separation of concerns in all manners of code, but that's the way it is. Micromanaging the look of my LaTeX creations involves lots of anger against the program's not-quite-perfect sense of aesthetics, a few wasted night, and a handful of life-saving low-level TeX macros. Tonight's fight involved the latter.

beamer is an impressive LaTeX mod for creating slides. The output is a PDF document, so you can only generate a sequence of static slides. No animations, no sound. I mention it in case you expected slide programs to provide these ridiculous toys; me, I'm used to text-only slides and box-based ornaments. That's because I was using LaTeX to create my slides way before I knew about beamer, so I improvised with what I thought was possible. beamer, with its colors and rounded boxes and navigation and gradually uncovered slides, sure showed me how much I underestimated the extent of the possible.

Yet with all of its features, there's one thing I used to be able to do (easily?) with LaTeX alone, and which beamer doesn't offer: uncovering by substitution. By "uncovering by substitution", I mean a slide transition that doesn't just add or highlight the next element, but which actually changes an existing element. You know, like \alt and \temporal do.

...Ok, so \alt and \temporal actually are beamer commands, so I guess the feature is provided after all. But it's implementation is rather shaky. I mean literally, my slides shake when I use these commands. That's because the alternatives are of slightly different lengths, which slightly displaces the remainder of the text, which makes an unpleasing shaking effect if I use several alternatives in quick succession. Again, most people probably aren't bothered by this at all, but I'm the obsessive type who wants the "presentation" part of his presentations to be exactly right.

As you must have guessed by now: here's my version of \alt. It's called \switch, and just like \uncover, it doesn't shake. Furthermore, it's argument is a list of \case<+>{...} clauses which will appear one after the other. Or at the same time, if you use overlapping ranges. That's both more general and more useful than \alt and \temporal, which are limited to two and three non-overlapping ranges, respectively.

And now that the extent of the possible has been increased once again... a new level of time-wasting attention to details can begin.