AlecMcE.com

I’ve started using Tweensy after realising that TweenMax requires a license fee for commercial use. Though my personal use is seldom commercial, why learn a library that’s useless to me when I am doing commercial work?

Firstly, a big nod to Shane McCartney, who has done the hard work of creating this new tweening library.

A new library means learning a new syntax. As I go, I will post a few things that I learn along the road, since as yet, Tweensy is not that widespread:

A Simple Tween

To tween an object’s position you can use a static method, like TweenMax:

Tweensy.to(myDisplayObject, {x:300, y:100});

It will tween over half a second, unless you add a third parameter indicating the duration of time. This is very close to TweenMax. The static method produces a TweensyTimeline, or you could just create a new TweensyTimeline and add the various properties to it.

A Color Tween

To tween an object’s color, you can create a TweensyGroup and add a colorTransformTo call to it.

var tween:TweensyGroup = new TweensyGroup();
var color:ColorTransform = new ColorTransform();
color.color = 0xFF0000;
tween.colorTransformTo(myDisplayObject, color);

A TweensyGroup I thought? I bet you can tween more than just one item simultaneously with that. And so you can:

Roll-over to trigger the tweens. Click outside when you’ve had enough! If for some odd reason you want the source then you can download it here.

A bit of API confusion

As yet, I’m not really clear what is the difference between a TweensyGroup and a TweensyTimeline. I’m sure it will become apparent. You can’t call TweensyTimeline.colorTransformTo though TweensyGroup.colorTransformTo returns a TweensyTimeline. My suspicion is that Shane spends longer at the chalk-face of creating his extremely impressive BitmapData effects than he does doing the dull-but-important job of ensuring that his API is clean and tidy. Alternatively, there may be a very good reason for the API decision, in which case I am extremely sorry for that supposition.