Home >
KitchenSync is an up-and-coming ActionScript 3.0 library for sequencing animations and other time-based actions. The project is focused on giving developers a smarter way to handle animation or other time-based, rather than frame-based, functionality with code. The whole project is geared towards using standard OO practices to make time-based synchronization easier on developers.
Creator Mims Wright recently announced a KitchenSync demo contest in anticipation of the KitchenSync 2.0 release, which has generated some buzz around my office and got me interested in the project. The winners will have their entries demoed at the upcoming <head> conference.
I recently caught up with Mims and had the opportunity to ask him some questions about the project. If you haven't heard of Mims before, he's a great developer who co-authored the Actionscript 3.0 Bible and has done a lot of great Flash work in his career. Mim's is a really friendly guy and agreed to an interview about KitchenSync.
InsideRIA: What inspired KitchenSync? What problem were you trying to solve?
Mims H Wright (MHW): About two years ago I was invited to work on a new AS3 version of a tweening library called FuseKit. This library was incredibly popular because of its ease of use and huge set of features. However, due to personal reasons I ended up having to leave the project. It later went on to form Go ASAP, the spiritual predecessor to FuseKit.
I had a lot of ideas bouncing around my head after leaving that project. I felt like even though there were some good AS3 tweening libraries (tweener and tweenMax among them) there was a need for a sophisticated, full-featured engine that was built with architectural best-practices. I also wanted to make something that was well documented with a logical syntax. I think so far, it's achieving those goals.
InsideRIA: Who’s involved in the project?
MHW:99% of the coding is still done by me, however, feedback from the users of the library has been vital in helping me find bugs and to determine what to work on next. I occasionally poll the community through my blog to see what people are interested in. When I meet a user who has a particular request, I always give them the opportunity to join the project as a contributor. So far, Aral Balkan and Brett Forsyth have accepted and fixed a couple of bugs. I hope one day there are more eager people involved.
InsideRIA: How long have you been developing Kitchen Sync?
MHW:I built version 0.1 in Summer of 2007 so that's about 15 months old. Version 1.0 was released in January '08. It has been a lot of work, yet, I find it very rewarding to not have anyone telling me how to make it.
InsideRIA: What are some of the features you’re currently working on?
MHW:Version 1.0 of the library really focused on setting up the basic functionality of sequencing and tweening. It was the core of the platform.
I'm currently working on Version 2.0 which brings the performance and feature set up to the level of its competing frameworks ('competing' is a strange word since they're all open source). Specifically, I'm adding:
• The ability to tween multiple targets at once with a single tween.
• Filter tweens and color tweens.
• A Fuse-like syntax and other utilities for quickly creating tweens.
• New types of sequences like reverse-parallel where all the actions end simultaneously and another which makes it easy to create slideshows.
• A lightweight variation on tween with fewer features but 25% faster performance.
• The ability to control motion on the timeline, i.e. programatically tween between two frames of a MovieClip
For more on KitchenSync, check out the homepage on Google Code.
Tag Cloud
Podcasts & Screencasts
@InsideRIA on Twitter
Follow InsideRIA on Twitter
Facebook Application Development
Comments
Leave a comment