Andrew Fitzgerald, the author of Twease, has spent hundreds of hours figuring out how to squeeze maximum features and performance into an incredibly compact tweening package. He began Twease quite a while ago before realizing that TweenLite existed, and needless to say, the two engines share remarkably similar objectives. Andrew announced yesterday that he plans to throw his support behind the GreenSock tweening platform and discontinue development of Twease. It is an honor to have him on board. He has been taking a look at v11 and said he loves the direction. It’s great to know that we’ll have another pair of experienced eyes looking things over, helping to make the platform even more robust and reliable. Welcome to all the Twease users out there.
gTween and TweenLite/Max Unite?
Grant Skinner is one of the most well-respected Flash developers in the world. His inspiring work and generous contributions to the Flash community have earned him a stellar reputation and countless fans. So it is with great excitement that I announce our collaboration on the upcoming release of TweenLite and TweenMax. Grant’s recent Beta offerings of his gTween engine showed great promise and as we talked, it became obvious that we have similar objectives. We figured it made a lot of sense to put our heads together and build on TweenLite and TweenMax, creating a unified platform that’s better, faster, and more flexible than ever. Grant has a proven track record of looking for ways to benefit the overall Flash community, and this is just one more example. It is truly an honor to have his valuable input.
While we’re confident that the collaboration will bear good fruit, there is always a chance that we’ll hit an impasse. Thus far, however, we seem to share remarkably similar goals, convictions, and…most importantly…initials – “Grant Skinner” and “GreenSock”. Coincidence or fate?
Accompanying this announcement is v11 Beta 1 of the GreenSock Tweening Platform. It’s a work-in-progress, and we welcome your input. Get the details and code here.
Announcing TweenLite/Max Version 10
This update of TweenLite and TweenMax is probably the most significant ever, so I figured the announcement warranted a page of its own to describe all the exciting enhancements and to answer common questions.Full documentation still resides on the regular TweenLite and TweenMax pages. Version 10 delivers a whole new level of flexibility, performance, and tweenable goodness…
LiquidStage – Automatically Reposition/Stretch DisplayObjects in Full-Browser SWFs
LiquidStage allows you to “pin” DisplayObjects to reference points on the stage (or inside other DisplayObjects) so that when the stage is resized, they are repositioned and maintain their relative distance from the PinPoint. For example, you could make a logo Sprite stay in the bottom right corner when the stage is resized.
You can also scale or stretch DisplayObjects using the LiquidArea class which allows you to define a rectangular area that expands and contracts as the stage resizes, and you attach DisplayObjects so that they fill the area, scaling in any of the following modes: STRETCH, PROPORTIONAL_INSIDE, PROPORTIONAL_OUTSIDE, WIDTH_ONLY, or HEIGHT_ONLY. For example, you could have a bar snap to the bottom of the screen and stretch horizontally to fill the width of the stage. Or add a background image that proportionally scales to fill the entire stage.
TweenGroup – Manage Sequences and Groups of TweenLite/Max Tweens
With the launch of v11, TweenGroup has been offially deprecated in favor of the much more capable, flexible TimelineLite and TimelineMax classes. They do almost exactly what TweenGroup did but in a much more intuitive, flexible, powerful way. You can even nest timelines within timelines. I realize TweenGroup’s deprecation may sound like bad news to some developers, but trust me, once you use TimelineLite/Max I’m confident you’ll see why this is a good move. I try very hard to avoid deprecating things because people grow to rely on the code, so rest assured that I didn’t make this decision lightly.
OverwriteManager – control how (and if and when) tweens get overwritten
OverwriteManager resolves conflicts between tweens and controls if (and how) existing tweens of the same target are overwritten. Think of it as a referee or traffic cop for tweens. For example, let’s say you have a button with ROLL_OVER and ROLL_OUT handlers that tween an object’s alpha and the user rolls their mouse over/out/over/out quickly. Most likely, you’d want each new tween to overwrite the other immediately so that you don’t end up with multiple tweens vying for control of the alpha property. That describes the ALL_IMMEDIATE mode which is the default mode of TweenLite when it is not used in conjunction with TweenMax, TimelineLite, or TimelineMax. This keeps things small and fast. However, it isn’t ideal for setting up sequences because as soon as you create subsequent tweens of the same target in the sequence, the previous one gets overwritten.
Custom Ease Builder – Easing Made Easy
Sometimes the standard easing equations (Elastic, Strong, etc.) don’t give you quite what you want. This tool allows you to interactively draw a curve for your own custom easing equation and it even writes the code for you. Just copy and paste it into your AS3 or AS2 application. The code it writes requires the gs.easing.CustomEase class which is a membership benefit of Club GreenSock.
Utilities for Code Hinting and Strict Typing in TweenLite/Filter/Max
I created some AS3 utility classes that can (optionally) be used with TweenLite or TweenMax that address two requests:
- Code hinting – Sometimes it’s hard to remember all the special properties that are available in the tweening classes, so code hinting would be very useful. In most decent code editors like Flex Builder, FDT, etc. (NOT the Flash Authoring tool), these classes will trigger code hinting (see screen capture below).
- Strict datatyping – Some developers are extremely passionate about strict datatyping and they’re scared away by TweenLite/Max’s “loosey-goosey” treatment of the vars Object. Many others love the flexibility, efficiency, and readability of that same feature. This utility should make it easier on the strict datatyping folks.
TweenMax – TweenLite on Steroids
Version: 11.2, Updated 2010-03-06
File size added to compressed SWF: About 8.7kb (base), or 17.6kb with default plugins and OverwriteManager
What's new in v11?
v11 represents the biggest update to the platform ever, by far. Please check out the official announcement page for details about the changes and new features.
Description
TweenMax extends the extremely lightweight, fast TweenLite engine, adding [...]
TransformMatrixProxy – Tween skewX, skewY, and more
TransformMatrixProxy has been deprecated in favor of the transformMatrix plugin for TweenLite and TweenMax which performs faster and is simpler to use.