TXEFF component shortcomings

Code hint­ing and documentation

In the Flash GUI, TXEFF behaves well and nice but when you want to use it in a code envi­ron­ment like FlashDe­velop, it is a pain to open the doc­u­men­ta­tion (on PDFs) and browse through it till you find, or not, the method/properties you were look­ing for. First, a javadoc-like doc­u­men­ta­tion would help. Sec­ond, AS3 wrap­per classes would be very wel­come. When I import TXEFF in FlashDe­velop, cre­ate a new instance and write “myEf­fectIn­stance.” and wait for a list­ing of the avail­able meth­ods and attrib­utes, noth­ing shows up. Alright, it’s a detail but still disappointing.

Black­box

The cause of this is the way the com­po­nent is meant : a black box. The component’s sources are obfus­cated and we only have access to .mxp files. At first I thought I’d write an inter­face that defines all the meth­ods used in the com­po­nent but it’s a par­tial solu­tion for there are a lot of attrib­utes that can’t be defined in the inter­face. I’d need to write a wrap­per class but it’s just a bother to do that now.

In spite of this, I strongly rec­om­mend jumpeyecomponents’s TXEFF. It is a big help which lets you con­cen­trate on other tasks. This exhaus­tive review on web­de­sign­er­wall (beau­ti­ful blog btw) shows you the com­po­nent thor­oughly. You can also test a few effects on the txeff web­site.

Pric­ing

TXEFF costs 169$. It’s not that of a big invest­ment con­sid­er­ing you’re very likely to use it in sev­eral projects, if you’re a Flash/Flex designer, that is.

A sam­ple done in a few minutes

Click any­where in the swf to replay.

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