Thursday, February 25, 2010

Video: The Animation Class in Flex 4

The Animation Class in Flex 4, the next episode in the gripping and suspenseful series CodeDependent, is now available from Adobe TV.

This episode covers the new Animation class in Flex 4, which is the underlying timing engine used by all of the Flex 4 effects. You will usually use this class indirectly, by using Flex 4 effects, but you can also use the class directly, providing a target object for Animation to call as it calculates new property values each frame.

For anyone used to Flex 3 effects, Animation is the new Tween. It uses some of the same mechanisms, but has added many capabilities, like repetition behavior, to support the enhanced capabilities of Flex 4 effects. We also meddled a bit with the API a bit as long as we were in there (for example, it doesn't auto-play on construction, like Tween does).

Here's the video:

Here is the demo application:

And here is the source code.

Here's where you can find CodeDependent on iTunes.

And here's where you can find CodeDependent on YouTube.

Enjoy.

2 comments:

BACKBEAT said...

Hi there --

Quick question. Where can the "utilities.PropertyAnimator" reference you are using actually be found? I popped your code into FlashBuilder 4 and am having problems with that library.

Thanks.

Chet Haase said...

@BACKBEAT: The source code link above has both the application file and the PropertyAnimator class (in the utilities folder). Not sure what the problem is, but when I copied these files into a project (making sure to put PropertyAnimator into a utilities package), it built and ran fine...