decker labs

Recently I was working on preloader for a project and needed to use a tweening engine. (We have an internally developed one at Firstborn that is based off of the syntax of Tweener). I wanted to see if I could write my own that would be super small. I wasn’t as concerned with performance – meaning being able to tween thousands of objects at once, a highly unlikely scenario anyways. I wanted to keep compiled file size down, as well as number of classes. So I created a NanoTween class that is a super simple tweening utility. When compiled on it’s own, it only consist of about 1.3 Kb.

NanoTween is only one class. Each tween is created as it’s own more or less independent object. They are however synchronized to a central enter frame event dispatcher, which is kept as a static instance. Instead of providing callback functions and parameters for events such as onComplete and onUpdate (as is the case with some tween engines) NanoTween instead dispatches native Event.COMPLETE and Event.ENTER_FRAME. Additionally, the Robert Penner easing functions are externalized into separate classes to keep filesize down. Special properties such as brightness are not included, but can easily be achieved though an external proxy object.

The syntax looks like this:
var tween:NanoTween = new NanoTween(myMovieClip, 1.5, {x:100, y:200}, Quad.easeOut);
tween.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, hndlTweenComplete);
tween.start(1);

The previous example will tween myMovieClip to the position (100,200) over the period of 1.5 seconds using the ease out Quad function, and is delayed by 1 second. Upon completion of the tween the hndlTweenComplete will be called. Likewise, the syntax can also be ‘condensed’ for simple tweens:
new NanoTween(myMovieClip, 1, {alpha:0}).start();

Anyhow, I thought it might be useful to other people, and I wanted to try out Google Code so you can grab it from the project page at: https://code.google.com/p/nanotween/. Once again, the purpose of this is not to replace mammoth tween engines such as gTween, TweenMax, or Tweener. Rather, it is intended for special cases where size is the main importance such as preloaders and banner ads.

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I don’t know how this escaped me for so long, but the other day I realized that Flash doesn’t understand HTML character entity reference codes. Codes other than & and a few others won’t render out to their appropriate symbol. So for example, if I need to display a special character in an HTML page, I would normally use the &+code+; in order to display it. So “copyright ©2009 eric decker” would be “copyright © 2009 eric decker”. So it would make sense that if I bring in this copy into flash, set it to a textfield with the set htmlText method, that it would have the same result. However, it doesn’t. &copy will read exactly as &copy.  Flash does, however, understand numeric reference codes, which look like ©. Personally, I find the name-based entity codes easier to use and seem like they are more widely used (although I could be wrong about that, I’m not a HTML guy).

Anyways, determined to be able to use © instead of the more ambiguous © I wrote a class that is able to understand the entity codes. The reasons for this were 1. as I just mentioned, the name based codes are easier to read and 2. sometime you’re not in charge of your source copy, and it might contain entity based symbols instead of numeric and of course 3. developers are a little neurotic like that and sometimes ‘do it for the sake of doing it.’ (That could be  a T-Shirt.) I was able to write a pretty simple converter using a regular expression and a lookup dictionary. You can download the class or view it as text.

The class contains one accessible static function that you pass your raw text to and it returns the new formatted text: myTextField.htmlText = HTMLTextUtils.formatHTMLTokens(myString);  Better yet, if you have a custom TextField class that you’ve extended, you can override the set htmlText function to have it always use this function.

Grant Skinner’s RegExr is a huge help when doing anything with RegEx.