Video: Using Flexy in a Flash Project

Using Libraries in Flash Pro, the next episode in the gripping and suspenseful series CodeDependent, is now available from Adobe TV.

This espisode is the stunning conclusion to the previous nail-biting cliff-hanger episode, Creating a Reusable Animation Library, in which we saw how to use Flash Pro to create Flexy, a small and Flex-free version of the timing engine underlying Flex effects. In this episode, we see how to use Flash Pro to link against Flexy and use it to create a simple ActionScript-based animation, writing code that looks very close to what we would write in Flex 4 for doing the same animation.

Once again, my thanks go to Trevor McCauley for helping me figure this out. Trevor's on the Flash player team and is very helpful is figuring out all kinds of things about how Flash works, including this bit about Flash authoring. Check out his blog at senocular.com.

I should probably spend more time and words on the Flexy library itself, but that will have to be for another day and another blog entry. But check out the previous episode for more information, and use your vast knowledge about the Flex Animation class and the related classes that you've accumulated so far from my blog and videos. It all carries over to Flexy, because Flexy is basically a subset of what I've been talking about with Flex 4 effects. It's just the timing engine part of effects (the 'Tween' engine, in Flash parlance), plus a helper class to assist in setting the animated properties on the target objects.

But for now, I'll just stick with the content of this show.

Here's the video:

Here is the demo application:

Here is the demo code. This is the Flash Pro project (FlexyTest.fla), which links to the Flexy library itself (Flexy.swc).

Here's where you can find CodeDependent on iTunes.

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

Enjoy.