Every now and then, ActionScript 3.0 bums me out. Sometimes, when you want to do a thing seemingly straightforward, AS3 makes you drudge through a lot of monotonous boilerplate coding. For me, this is most true when creating custom events. That’s why I was so relieved to come across Robert Penner’s AS3 Signals. AS3 Signals is a faster and easier way to deal with events—particularly custom events—in AS3. I haven’t delved too deep into its capabilities but what I have experienced so far has been fantastic.
Working on a recent Flash/ActionScript 3 project, I got a chance to use an amazing library by GreenSock (the makers of arguably the best tweening engines, TweenLite and TweenMax) called TransformManager. As the name implies, TransformManager is an incredibly easy way to interactively move, scale, skew, and rotate DisplayObjects in ActionScript 3.
For me, the coolest part of TransformManager is the level of detail in the functionality, above and beyond standard moving, scaling, and rotating. Are you used to holding down shift on a control point for proportional scaling? TransformManager does that. Have that instinctual urge to press the delete button to get rid of a selected object? TransformManager does that too. Want to select multiple objects at the same time? Yup. You can also control everything programmatically. And, with a heavy set of event notifications, your app can always know exactly what TransformManager is doing.
You might experience some sticker shock at $299, but if you consider all of the time you’ll save, it’s a pretty sweet deal.
