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The new AS3 version of Tweensy looks quite promising. The author (Shane McCartney) claims that it runs faster than the fastest available TweenLite tweening engine (since than a new version of TweenLite is out, so TweenLite might be faster again, but still Tweensy is faster than e.g. Tweener).

Other interesting feature is the bezier-curve motion guide, where the object does not decelerate or accelerate when following the curves like in other tweening engines.

The TweensyZero package weights only 2.9kB and you can extend it's functionality with extra packages like MatrixTransform and ColorMatrixFilters. With MatrixTransform you can tween transformations of skewX,skewY and other properties around a defined registration point - cool! With TweensyFX you can achieve some impressive bitmap effects.

This tweening engine is definitely something to consider when starting a new projects, or when it is needed to achieve some special visual effects.

Visit the Google page of Tweensy to see some cool examples!

Current Tweensy license: MIT

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Grant Skinner developed a new tweening engine which suits his needs the best : it's small, fast and powerful. It was inspired by TweenLite but adds new and useful features:

- AS3 event model (addEventListener...) instead of callbacks
- interrupting tweens
- reversing tweens on the fly
- adding tween parameters on the fly
- synchronised tweening with tweenChilds
- sequencing tweens with nextTween
- time/frame/hibrid timing mode
- class-wide pausing of all tweens
- advanced resource management (no memory leaks)

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Jack Doyle took the TweenLite and TweenFilterLite classes, put them together and added some handy features. The result is the TweenMax class, or "TweenLinte on Steroids" as the author describes his class.

Some of the extra features you can find in the TweenMax class:
- pause/play
- orient object rotation to bezier path
- AS3 event listeners
- easier sequencing

Check the script's homepage for a more detailed feature comparsion.

The class is free and you are welcome to donate to Jack Doyle.

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TweenLite is a tweening engine that was developed with the focus keeping its filesize as low as possible.

It is almost incredible, but it adds only 2kb to your projects. If you are creating flash web banners and their size should be small, this tweening engine is a must.

Despite the small size you can use features like delays, callbacks, pass custom arguments to the callback functions and use it in project of any scale (also the large ones).

There is also a lightweighted Filter Tweening extension.

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Tweener is the successor of the MC Tween class by Zeh Frenando. Its focus is on simplicity and to be lightweight.
It adds only a few kB to your code, less than ZigoEngine or the Animation package. It is ideal if you need just the tween functionality and don't need to build complex sequences like with Zigo's Fuse.

But Tweener is still very powerful, you can tween several properties at once and define callbacks. Moreover, it is easy to implement and to use.

Favourable is the very good documentation and examples which give you a very fast startup when using the Tweener library for the first time.

It has both AS2 and AS3 version, you can use it in your Flash Lite movies and what more, it does have even an Haxe port!

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MC Tween is a very easy to use tweening engine. Also a design-oriented flash developer without much Actionscript knowledge can use it. I remember I have used it by myself before I knew the Object Oriented Actionscript programming.

How the tweening engine works is that it extends the functions of the basic MovieClip class. So you can then create a tween in a simple command like this:
myMovieclip.tween("_x", 100);

MC Tween is nice documented and has nice examples on it's homepage. You can also preview the animation types in sample flash movies.

Recently, Zeh Fernando started developing a new tweening engine called Tweener. It is both AS2 and AS3 and I will introduce it in the next article.

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Animation Package is a complex library which helps creating tweening animations. It provides also classes to draw basic shapes (arc, ellipse, rounded rectangle, spiral, star, etc...) and curves (line, curve, cubic curve and quad curve).
It's advantage is that it provides a simple interface to create movement on a curve (moveOnPath, moveOnCurve...) This is something that the other tweening engines do not support.
The library also provides interface to the flash 8 filters as drop shadow, blur and others. You can also take advantage of the funny shake class.

The AnimationPackage comes in three versions:

• AnimationPackage 1 (ActionScript 2, Flash Player 6 and above, Flash Lite 2)
• AnimationPackage 2 (ActionScript 2, Flash Player 8 and above)
• AnimationPackage 3 Alpha (ActionScript 3, Flash Player 9)

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Is lightweighted and very easy to implement. Its strength is that it is modular and consists of three parts:

• Animation Engine
• Sequencing tools
• BitmapFilter comfort

If you need just movieclip tweening, it is enough to use just the Animation Engine. Your project compiles faster and also has a smaller size.

Animation Engine - provides movieclip tweening. You can tween a movieclip property or properties with one single command.

Sequencing tools - make it simple to build also a complex sequence of movieclip tweening.

BitmapFilter comfort - provides a simplified interface for applying the bitmap filters.

Although there are also others animation packages, I think the Zigo engine is the most convenient one for an actionscript programmer. Its a pity that it does not have an AS3 version yet.