TweenLite Review

Posted January 27th, 2009 by Matus

TweenLite is a lightweight but powerful and easy to use tweening engine by Jack Doyle, which I prefer to use in my flash projects. The arguments for it's use are:

Easy to use:

The syntax is simple, clear and easy to remember.

TweenLite.to(square, 1, {x : 200, ease: Quad.easeOut});

Similar syntax has the Tweener tweening engine:

Tweener.addTween(square, {x:200, time:1, transition:"easeOutQuad"});

What makes this engine on par for simple tasks. But if your projects grows larger, more advanced or you need to have detailed control of the tweens, you will benefit of the advanced features of TweenLite/Max. All with the familiar simple “in-house” syntax. And what is really nice – you add new classes to your project only once you need them.

Small footprint:

A statue is perfect when there is no more stone to remove. A program is perfect when there is no more line of code to remove. The small footprint of a swf built with TweenLite illustrates that the TweenLite's code is designed both clever and efficient.

We can use the above example, a simple tween of x-property done with TweenLite and Tweener:

Tweener.swf : 10kB
TweenLite.swf : 4kB

Download the example here: BasicTweenTest.zip

A small footprint might come very handy when it comes to building a flash banner, where every kB counts.

Reliability:

Since the past few years I am developing flash applications TweenLite has never let me down. There was no task I could not achieve with TweenLite/Max. The code was always stable, without any memory issues.

Good documentation, examples:

Equally important is a good documentation. With the documentation and examples of TweenLite/Max I never felt lost and could figure out what I needed very fast. Good job!
If you are just starting using as3 code based tweening you will find extremely easy learning and using TweenLite/Max.

Pricing:

TweenLite/Max is free when you develop e.g. a flash website for your client. Only once you start selling products wich use TweenLite/Max or is the tweening engine engaged in some other way in a recurring profit (e.g. a paid website), you are asked to pay a very affordable corporate membership. I think this is very fair. You get also some extra classes, but what is more important you send Jack a message that you value his work and his time he spent for making your developers life easier.