Flash Web Design With TweenMax

TweenMax is an excellent utility for animation in Actionscript. You have the choice between “TweenLite” & “TweenMax”, depending on what kind of features your project requires… The former option is for those projects that require the bare minimum functionality of a tweening platform, while the latter is loaded with a ridiculous amount of tools that give you the power to take over the world (or at least the internet) with jaw dropping effects. Everything from elastic tween to ColorMatrixFilter, this tweening engine seriously does it all. Not to mention how well it cleans up after itself keeping memory and CPU usage nice and low. Although the exponential growth in computer/web technology has let us forget about the importance of system optimization, this is still an important part to a nice clean flash web appilication/website (“good practice”). And I feel that many actionscriptors out there who use this extremely popular tweening engine have forgotten about, or just never knew about the very simple method of turning off the features in tweenmax that arent being used…

At the end of every project, no matter how big or how small, it’s nice to take pride in your code and make some last final touches (making sure your new code is well organized and commented for example). Well if your using TweenMax (and I bet you are), it is also very important to just go into that /gs directory and open the TweenMax.as file (preferably in flashdevelop). Scroll down to line 345 where it says “ACTIVATE (OR DEACTIVATE) PLUGINS HERE…”. Perfect! Simply comment out the plugins that are not in use and TweenMax and your flash app is a little more happier. Memory is saved and your flash app might just run a little smoother. If your interested in even more functionality, try TweenMax Beta. It’s available for download on their website: http://blog.greensock.com/. Rock on!