It’s here! Greensock’s already very useful and comprehensive tweening platform has evolved into an entire suite of even more light weight and powerful animation engines. I try my best to avoid Flash’s default timeline animations due to their reliance on frame rate, choppiness, lack of easing options and inconvenient editing. There’s other tweening engines out there such as caurina’s, but you won’t find one as versatile, fast, lightweight, well documented and well supported as the ones produced by Greensock.
Version 11 appears to be the most changed release since the tweening platforms inception and there’s a small learning curve to get over. So, here’s the breakdown…
TweenNano
It’s 1.6k! TweenNano can handle your tweening needs for BLANK but it stops there with no support for timeline functions and limited overwrite controls.
TweenLite
This is currently the most commonly used class of the group. It’s gained a little weight (1.9k) which may seem surprising, but the with the utility it’s gained with timeline methods and with the introduction of TweenNano, you shouldn’t have any file size issues. The most comprehensive update to TweenLite is the pause(), resume(), reverse(), play(), and restart() methods, which you can see the power of in the animation on the Greensock blog.
TweenMax
A personal favorite. On top of TweenLite’s functionality, TweenMax adds performance enhancements, overwrite management, tweens for filters, hex colours, volume, tint, and even do bezier tweening.
TimelineLite
A new class that brings timeline controls for building and managing sequences at just 2.5k (8.1k with OverwriteManager and TweenLite).
TimelineMax
On top of TimelineLite’s utility, this brings infinite timeline nesting, time scale manipulation, listeners for START, UPDATE, REPEAT, REVERSE_COMPLETE, COMPLETE events and much more.
The full breakdown is of course on greensock’s version 11 page. All of the above are frequently updated for both AS3 and AS2. I’ll be using TweenMax and TimelineMax in my current project – a suite of 4 Flash touch games for the Royal Canadian Mint’s Vancouver 2010 Olympics campain playable on an HP Touchsmart dx9000.
Posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Cool, Flash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
