- Versatility – Great for tweening animation, yes, but also great for calling functions, disptaching events, playing sounds, controlling MovieClips, and more. Virtually any code can be run at a specific time. In KitchenSync, any event or behaviour that can be sequenced is called an “action“.
- Advanced sequencing – There are several types of action groups designed to meet the real-world sequencing needs of projects.
- Interchangeable groups – Treats all actions, including groups of actions (like sequences), as the same type of object so they can be interchanged. That means you can nest sequences inside of other sequences.
- Video-like controls – All actions, even groups, have the ability to play, pause, stop, reset, play backwards, loop, and jump to a specific time. Calling one of these functions on a group affects all of the items in the group.
- Beyond Penner – All the familiar easing functions are included as well as several original ones like oscillators. An easing utility class has also been added which allows you to create hybrid easing functions.
dispatchEvent()™
Collective thoughts on the Flash Platform, iOS, Unity, and any other technology we use.
Tagged with KitchenSync …
Tweening timeline animations with KitchenSync
by Mims H Wright
One of the new features in KitchenSync 1.5 is the ability to tween animations on a MovieClip’s timeline… and I’m not just talking about gotoAndPlay(), I’m talking about controlling the starting and stopping points, speed, and easing functions of an animation on the timeline with code. It does this by incrementally controlling the current frame number of the MovieClip using a KSTween and a special ITweenTarget (a class used to control the values of an object) called TimelineController.
Take this FLA animation.
As you can see, there is a simple animation using a guide layer and labels on the key frames.
A review of popular tweening library (UPDATED)
by Mims H Wright
The goal of next version of my (your) animation engine KitchenSync, is to be arguably the best and most complete library for animation and sequencing out there. To do this, I’ve spent the last couple of months analyzing the top existing tween libraries trying to pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses. With lots of help from the Draw Logic Blog, I think I’ve identified the contenders and put together a decent list of what (in my opinion) are their highest and lowest points. The next step will be to create a product backlog for KitchenSync based on matching these features and fixing the problems. I know there are other tween engines but these seemed to be the most prolific ones at the time. The tween engines analyzed were:
- Tweener
- TweenLite (and flavours)
- Boostworthy Animation System
- FuseKit
- Go
- and KitchenSync 1.1
Note: After some helpful feedback from readers (THANK YOU!) I added TweenLite to the list of libraries I reviewed. I should add here that these are fairly superficial observations about how things work and don’t go into incredible detail. If I steal any features, I’ll look closer ;-D
Keep the comments coming!