visualcondition blog - flash & ruby on rails

So the wait is finally over: Twease is now available in both AS2 and AS3!

I just started learning AS3 Monday, and today I have finished porting Twease 2.0 Beta into AS3. To be honest, most of if it really didn’t need to be rewritten, but a lot of the new compiler requirements made the loose checking of the AS2 version give me nightmares. I mean really, so what if it’s undefined? Ugh, but I digress.

This port was just to get the engine functional. There are almost zero optimizations made in regards to new AS3 features, but even so, I’m positive it will run fine for your average uses.

As i look back on the old Twease code after getting into AS3, I see a lot of places where things should be totally redone. But it works. And it works the same on both sides, so I’ll be letting it be.

There’s really not much more to say, except that Twease is now Beta 2, and that you should head on over to Google Code to get your AS3 fix on.

When you create a class that makes other developer’s lives easier, and see something that you made help make something pretty rad, it’s truly a magical feeling. When I see Partigen being used in the real world, I get giddy like a school girl. Albeit Twease is a bit different, it’s still a nice feeling.

So that’s why I’ve been hard at work on version 2 of this compact, yet powerful and robust tweening engine, packing in more bang-for-your-bytes. Originally it was just going to be a minor upgrade with added color and simple bezier tweening, but it ended up so much more.

This beta is, in my opinion, fairly stable, and is being used in my own production projects. In fact, some of the features have been birthed due to necessity. I’d like to package this up nicely with docs et all, but first want to give it a test-drive with the public.

So without further adue, here’s what’s new with Twease 2.0 Beta (from the change log):

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This is the first (and only so far) XML image gallery I’ve ever made. It’s nice and tidy, and in 3 classes, unlike messy flas that you have to hack through. I made this almost exactly a year ago, and never really shared it for some reason, until now. It’s no use to me at all, and is not up to my OOP standards these days, but I’m sure many will find it useful in learning.

Given the fact it was my first and that it was such a long time ago, I really don’t remember the ins and outs of it. I just figured I’d put it out there since I wasn’t too happy with the quality of beginner XML gallery examples scattered across the ‘net.

So here’s a few features:

• Almost entirely XML based
• Class based, not FLA timeline
• Image preloading
• Fully customizable
• Tagging support in XML
• Visual tag filtering
• Thumbnail and expanded views with descriptions and titles
• Tag caching
• Image hyperlinking through XML
• And more little things

View Example

Pixgal and Example Included is the latest Fuse Kit which is needed. Also, this is made with Flash 8 and AS2, so I don’t know if it’ll work in MX2004.

My good friend Moses (of Fuse Kit fame), is working on a nice little framework he calls Go. I’ve had a sneak peak in the private pre alpha beta gamma theta, and while very much in its infant stages, it looks promising and very OOP.

Technically right now it’s not very useful, but that’s kind of the point. It’s made as a framework to be built off of for tweening etc yourself (or others), not a full blown kit a la Fuse. With an almost cult-like following of Fuse, I don’t think Moses will have a single problem getting this little framework heavily adopted, but, we’ll have to see.

Whew, Twease 1.1 is hot off the desktop of yours truly. Been working on this one off and on for a few weeks, and it’s a nice little upgrade.

Twease Homepage

We’ve got new Array tweening features, Penner Easing Equations are now included, some bug fixes and optimizations, and a new beta Extend class. This Extend class is still an infant, and only really provides a getTweens function for now. We’re also under 200 lines of code for the core Twease class now, and still only 2k, even with new features!

Expect color and bezier in 1.2 as well as polishing off the Extend class and squashing any bugs that come up in this release. 1.3 I’m thinking will be the filter tweening release. After that, it’s pretty much done.

I know I know, AS3 AS3. I haven’t even touched it yet, I’ve been a bit busy ya know?

This release fixes critical bugs for Twease.

1st bug - Garbage collection would set the Twease engine active to false, preventing any new tweens from running. New tweens now detect this and start the engine back up again.

2nd bug - This one was quite silly and should have never been published. Delays and cycles would not work together, and I think delays cut off a tween’s total time. I think this came about during optimizations.

This update is highly recommended and is pretty much mandatory for proper engine function.

Twease is a new tweening engine and sequencer I’ve just developed for AS2.

So check it out, and enjoy!

http://play.visualcondition.com/twease/

http://www.gskinner.com/talks/50reasonsAS3/

I didn’t really even know what half of any of that meant, but boy do I want it! I thought I knew most of the new things, but that really helped bring it together.

Seriously though, I can’t wait to get into AS3.

Okay, here’s the HASIFF class rewrote to work for the Shasi Framework and the updated framework.

You can see an example of the SIFF interpreter in action here.

I’ll edit this later and write more up on each.

I just released version 0.1 of The Shasi Framework (Semantic Human-ActionScript Interpreter). The page is really ugly now, and there’s not much there besides a download link. I just got it working so be patient.

This is the more general framework for what my last post was, HASIFF. This doesn’t do anything specific by itself, but acts more as an OOP foundation for whatever you want to do. Obviously.

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