I have been using the Tween class built into Flash for animation. Yes, it is a bit tedious to set up a simple animation. I have to create a bunch of Timer objects in order to sequence the action if there is more than one animation. The other way would be to add event listeners to the Tween objects to trigger the next animation in sequence. But both ways are quite tedious and involve many lines of code.
So I was exploring other animation script libraries to use. I definitely would look for ones that work with AS3, because there is a marked difference between AS2 and AS3 performance. I have looked at the FuseKit which includes the ZigoEngine and Fuse, the Tweener, and the TweenLite classes, and a couple of other new kids on the block.
Although I know the ZigoEngine and FuseKit have been around for a long time and have a big following among designers and developers. One of my previous colleague used the Zigo engine in his Flash projects many years ago. But today, it seems that the code development have all but died down, and stopped at AS2.
The Tweener classes are hosted on google code and seems quite well documented. And it supports AS3. Based on some benchmarking, Tweener classes are slower than TweenLite. But if there aren’t hundreds of objects to animate, Tweener can be a strong contender with TweenLite. Tweener classes have also been ported to javascript.
I did not look much into Go because an initial read off its official website make me think it is a bit too complicated. And it seems like the FuseKit people are behind Go as a AS3-compatible successor to FuseKit. Maybe I can be wrong here. But that’s my impression.
Another tweening engine that looked promising is HydroTween that is AS3 compatible and supports sequencing.
Last but not least, I have to say: even though the name of “TweenLite” sounded the least promising, it turned out to impress me the most in terms of its ease of use, its performance, and its AS3 support. The Tweener class seems slower than TweenLite and bulkier in size. In terms of documentation and support, TweenLite has the website that I liked the most of all three.
So, for me, the winner is TweenLite/TweenMax. I would definitely give it a try sooner than later.
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