It saves the world (TM)

I know I said this before. But I don't know where my life would be without MC tween. Thanks Mason Poe for showing me the way.

Key features of MC Tween

It's simple. You see, there are several others tweening extensions available. Some of them are really powerful. However, when creating this one, I wanted to make it simple to use - so most Flash designers could use it - while still keeping it powerful. That's why MC Tween simply adds new methods and functions to the MovieClip, TextField and Sound classes, instead of creating a new class with its own methods and functions. That means that you just need to #include "mc_tween2.as" and use one simple command to create a new tweening - you don't have to create a new tween object, add tweenings, start them, etc. While there are real reasons to make it OOP-orthodox by using classes, I wanted to make it simple, easy, fast, powerful, and readable.

It doesn't use the MovieClip's own onEnterFrame event. That was a problem on the first tweening prototypes, as they used the original object's onEnterFrame, meaning you couldn't use it anymore yourself. MC Tween does a clean job of keeping its own business elsewhere, as to not mess with the tweened objects themselves.

It is based on time, not on frames. This is actually one of the best features of time-based tweening engines. With this, you can create transitions completelly based on time, and not on the computer speed. If you tell a MovieClip to alphaTo() in 1 second, for example, it will take 1 second to do the fade, no matter what's the speed of the computer or the movie. This is most welcomed when creating movies that will run with similar timings on all kinds of CPUs and OSs available - so Mac users won't have to wait for 10 seconds just for a text to fade out, for example. While the playback quality will still suffer on slow machines - the framerate will always be lower than ideal - MC Tween ensures that the user doesn't have to wait more because of that. All users will have the same transition times.

It's reusable and can be used at different times. You can tween different properties from on the same object, at different times - none will get overwritten. You can also issue different several tweens on the same property on a sequential way - ultimately, creating complex new animations, one transition per line of code.

You can tween as many properties as you want on a single line. It can use arrays as parameters, so you can do complex tweenings with one simple line of code.

It has shortcut methods to make coding easy and the source more readable. You don't need separate fade, slide, transform, and color protoypes - this one does it all that with a similar syntax. You could only use the tween() method directly for all kinds of tweenings possible, but in case you're doing some standard tweenings, you can use slideTo(), alphaTo() or colorTo(), just to cite a few examples.

You can also use it on TextFields and on Sound objects.This is not a MovieClip-only tweening extension, as it adds new methods for manipulating other types of objects.


It saves the world (TM).