As you may have read in my last post, I was lucky enough to get my hands on a beta version of “Tweensy“. Tweensy is an actionscript 3 tweening library from Shane over at Lost In Actionscript. Within the short time that I have been able to use the library I have been amazed at the speed and simplicity of it’s use. As of today, Tweensy has officially gone public!

There are two main libraries available plus an FX expansion package: Tweensy Original and Tweensy Zero. In Shane’s latest post he describes why Tweensy is better than any other as3 tweening engine. To sum it up, he uses Object Pooling and utilizes DoubleLinked lists rather than a Dictionary or Array. I could try and go into more detail, but Shane does a better job at explaining.

Ease of use is the main seller for me. Yes performance is great to have when you are working on high profile, bleeding edge projects. However I am often working on more basic projects that need to be completed on a tight deadline. Currently I use Tweener. It is so simple to setup and use. There are a couple of extra steps that you will need to take with Tweensy to accomplish the same ol’ tween as Tweener. Tweensy Zero should make it more worth my while though on the smaller projects. The entire library is compressed down to 2.9kb! I’m not sure to what extend this version is limited, but it will be great to help spiffy up some boring banners!

Of course what I’m most excited about is the effects package that Shane has created that pairs with Tweensy well. It currently is somewhat limited to creating emitters and glowing blurry objects (as you can tell in my first demo and many of Shane’s), but he has also used it to create a cool BumpMap and Bulge demos. Also, Shane claims it’s easy to create better tweens that animate on complicated motion guides with Tweensy.

Now I’m off to download the latest source from Google Code! Be sure to snag your copy and post your demos!