Pledge drive: Help me help 360|Flex who is helping me
The 360|Flex conference is coming up soon - March 8-10 in San Jose. It seems that John and Tom - the organizers - have everything ready to go except for one little item: getting a sponsor for the USB Thumbdrive that comes in the swag-bag. They offered it to me but it's a little out of my marketing budget for RunPee.com - which is zero dollars. But they are on the hook either way so we worked out a deal. I'll start a pledge drive and try to raise as much money as I can to cover the cost of sponsoring the thumbdrive - $1,300 target. In exchange they will put RunPee.com on it. I'm not on the hook for anything except trying to raise money to cover their costs so that they don't take a loss.
We would all appreciate it if you chipped in a few bucks. I will give every dollar donated to my Paypal account to 360|Flex up until the conference is over. Let me know if you would like for your donation to be public or not because I'll keep a running tab on this page of who donated and how much.
Paypal donations to: Dan@polyGeek.com
Thanks for your support,
Dan Florio, John Wilker, Tom Ortega.
Dan Florio ( that's me )-$100, Lee Button-$100, Randy Troppmann-$100, David Ortinau-$50, Faisal Abid Founder-$55, Pintley.com-$50, Douglas Reynolds Consulting-$50, Nick Kwiatkowski-$25, Patrick McDonald-$10, Jeremy Saenz-$25, Ivan Alvarez-$25, Jen Floyd-$10, Matt LeGrand-$25, Jens Brynildsen-$25, Gates M Stoner-$20, Emerson Tyler Wright-$50, John Daily-$10, Jason Fincanon-$25, Evan Zeimet-$20 Here is a complete list of the people who have donated
There are three main ways that you would want to use Fuse to move a group of MovieClips:
animate everything one, after another
animate everything at the same time
animate everything on a staggered delay
Here is an example of the three groups ( download FLA )
The difference in how these work is pretty simple:
If you want each animation to run when the previous one has completed then just add the data for each target MovieClip individually, one after another.
If you want each animation to run at the same time then add all of the MovieClips as an array at the same time.
If you want to stagger the animations so that one starts before the previous one has completed then you push all the MovieClips at the same time, in an array, and add the delay argument to each set of data that you pass to your instance of Fuse.
Fuse is really powerful and I used to use it a lot until I found that it adds 55kb on top of your Flash movie. Now I use Tweener. Much smaller footprint and almost as powerful.
This is the function that I use when I need to create this effects (or any other tween effect, like alpha or anything) in a small SWF (advertising for instance).
/**
* Generic Tween function.
* @param obj Object – Object to be Faded. Default value = this.
* @param param String – Parameter to be tween, could be “_alpha”, “_x”, “_y”, “_xscale”, “_yscale” etc.
* @param endPos Number – End value of the tween parameter.
* @param p_dur Number – Duration of the tween in seconds. Default value = 1.
* @param tweenFinished Function – Function to be called when Fade finished. Default = undefined (no function called).
*/
public function tweenTo(obj:Object, param:String, endPos:Number, p_dur:Number, tweenFinished:Function):Void
{
obj = (obj==undefined)? this:obj;
p_dur=(p_dur==undefined)? 1:p_dur;
obj._visible = true;
if (obj.objTween!=undefined)
obj.objTween.stop();
obj.fadeTween = new Tween(obj, param, Regular.easeOut, obj[param], endPos, p_dur, true);
if (tweenFinished != undefined)
obj.objTween.onMotionFinished = Delegate.create(obj, tweenFinished);
}
Usage:
tweenTo(mc, “_alpha”, 100, 1);
or
tweenTo(mc, “_y”, 150, 1);
I have several functions like that one (some uses arrays of tweens) that do the same, but allowing multiple effects, etc.
There’s another tween engine that I just learned about last night called Tween-lite. I’ll take it for a test drive soon and write about it. From what I understand it has the best performance and the smallest file footprint.
Wow, tween-lite rocks ;) at least what they say about it, I’ve to go a little deeper into the code…
Thanks polyGeek, I didn’t know it and it looks pretty good.
About polyGeek Dan Florio is a freelance Actionscript Flex/Flash/AIR developer. He loves playing and exploring with code and sharing what he finds with his friends and peers here on this blog. He also created the website RunPee.com that has become an international sensation and pays most of the bills.
Dave
