The business case for a corporate Club GreenSock membership
GreenSock code uses a rather unique licensing model that makes it especially well-suited for businesses. It has many of the strengths of open source in that it is extremely accessible and free to use in the vast majority of scenarios, but it also has protections in place that guard against the common frailties of open source. When you invest in a corporate Club GreenSock membership, you get:
- several bonus plugins and members-only classes that further empower development (like MotionBlurPlugin, Physics2DPlugin, TweenProxy3D, SplitTextField, and more).
- a special license that permits the type of commercial usage that isn’t covered under the standard “no charge” license.
- SVN access for easy updates
- to support ongoing development and innovation, helping to ensure that the platform continues to thrive.
The cost of the corporate membership is easily offset by reduced development costs, smoother animations, improved reliability, better support, and the unique capabilities that the platform delivers. It makes your team more profitable, plain and simple.
How long will it take to pay for itself?
Fill out the form and click “calculate” to find out.
Beyond the basics: inspiration or perspiration?
If you want great animation, give your team the tools they need to get it done right. Any tweening engine can do an adequate job with the basics like tweening an object’s position or alpha level, but throw an average engine into a real-world project with aggressive requirements and deadlines and you’ll quickly see how frustrating it can be to build on an engine with a weak feature set. Can it tween saturation, contrast, beziers, frames, hex colors, and volume? Does it give advanced options for handling overwriting of overlapping tweens? How easy is it to build complex sequences and control them as a whole? Can you reverse a tween smoothly? Can you update destination values on the fly? Do you have to worry about garbage collection issues? Can you easily kill all the tweens of a particular object? How about skipping to a particular point in a tween? No other engine has a feature set as robust as the GreenSock Tweening Platform’s. Your profitability relies on your development team being as productive as possible, so equip them well.
Performance impacts your bottom line
Sluggish performance, slow frame rates, and stuttering tweens reflect poorly on your brand. The GreenSock platform outperforms most (if not all) engines in real-world scenarios, often by a wide margin. Countless hours have been spent refining and optimizing the code. See the speed comparisons for yourself. Some customers have reported a 50% boost in frame rate when they switched to using TweenLite. This had a direct impact on their product sales and the perception of their brand.
Debugging: the ugly truth
In business, reliability is essential. Time is money. You can’t afford down time. If there’s a bug in the tweening engine, you need it fixed ASAP. Most other engines have no funding mechanism for continued innovation and support, so they tend to stagnate. It’s common for known bugs to linger for quite a long time, but the GreenSock platform has a reputation for reliability because of prompt bug fixes and a commitment to being responsive. A tweening engine has a lot of moving parts and sometimes bugs aren’t exposed until certain uncommon conditions are met, so having a huge user base helps them quickly bubble to the surface. Ultimately you get a more reliable product and less down time. That’s good for business.
Beauty or bloat?
Many tweening engines suffer from the dreaded “feature bloat”, using as much as 40k even if all you need to do is basic tweening! The GreenSock Tweening Platform has been carefully engineered to minimize bloat by using optional plugins, inheritance, and 3 choices of core engines based on size and feature requirements. TweenNano uses a ridiculously small 1.6k and TweenLite is under 5k. Most businesses at least occasionally work on projects that have strict file size requirements, rendering some other engines unusable.
Training costs reduced
Not only does the GreenSock Tweening Platform offer full ASDoc documentation, many code examples, a “getting started” article, several training videos, and a myriad of interactive examples, but there is a massive community of users who can help answer questions and troubleshoot in forums. And since the platform is so popular, there’s a good chance that new hires will already know how to use it. GreenSock is the only actively supported popular engine that is available in both AS2 and AS3 with identical syntax. So AS2 developers moving to AS3 won’t have to learn a whole new system.
The real cost of developing your own solution
Some developers get the impression that building a tweening engine is pretty simple. Sure, a basic engine is relatively straightforward, but not a robust one that handles advanced effects, flexible sequencing, complex overwriting routines, competent garbage collection, and maximum performance. A few of the most well-respected developers in the Flash community have created engines that had some nifty features as well as a heavy dose of bugs. Your team could take a shot at authoring one too, but don’t forget to consider all the costs. There’s the initial development cost plus ongoing maintenance, documentation, debugging, optimization, support and training. More than 3,000 hours have gone into the GreenSock Tweening Platform thus far and it continues to be improved. Is this really the type of project you want to take on internally? Does it make sense from a business perspective? Can you afford it? It could easily be 100 times more expensive than a corporate Club GreenSock membership.
History or mystery?
Over the years, many open source tweening engines have popped onto the scene, gotten some buzz, and then gradually stagnated and faded off the scene. The typical pattern is for a new engine to show up touting some sort of great feature (speed, file size, syntax or interesting capability) but when you scratch below the surface you see significant deficiencies that make it difficult to use in real-world projects. When it stagnates, its users are left building on an outdated, unsupported engine that has no future innovation ahead. The GreenSock platform is more trustworthy because it has a proven track record and a funding mechanism.
Don’t take our word for it
Some of the biggest companies in the world use the GreenSock platform including Toyota, Verizon, Disney, Sony, Virgin Mobile, Dow, KFC, Kraft, Motorola, and many more. Here are a few quotes:
Conclusion
Wise business people look at what something “pays”, not just what it costs. When you consider the facts, your investment in the GreenSock platform can pay huge dividends in terms of faster development, greater reliability, improved performance, and lower training expenses. It can make your business more profitable, plain and simple.
