To be able to use Flash to it’s fullest, you need to be able to control animation (or tweening as it’s better known) from within Actionscript. There have been many solutions these last few years, with Tweener being the most well known and popular. Now comes a faster and smaller tweening platform: TweenLite. Written by Jack Doyle, this new tweening platform has taken everyone by surprise.

It comes in two different versions: TweenLite and TweenMax. The difference between the two is basically the level of functionality and the amount of features (TweenLite/Max features). TweenLite has less functionality and features, and therefore is smaller in file size (5k with default plugins). TweenLite is perfect for your more basic projects. TweenMax, has far more functionality and features, but the offset is the increased file size (14k with default plugins).

To keep file size small, TweenLite and TweenMax are broken up into plugins. Each plugin contains certain features like filter blurring, color transformation and bezier tweening to name a few. The great thing about using plugins is that you only include the plugins that you need to use for your project. This reduces your Flash file size and also helps speed up tweening.

TweenLite supports both AS2 and AS3. AS2 support is great for those who still need to work with Flash Player installs earlier than Flash Player 9, though obviously the speed is much slower. The AVM2 engine (AS3) is much more efficient in performance, and you can see this in the speed tests on Jack’s site.

Speaking of performance, Jack has also created a Speed Comparison which compares all the major Tweening Platforms against TweenLite. TweenLite is incredibly fast. You can see the Speed Comparison here.

The use of TweenLite is limited to projects and games that don’t charge end users money. You can also donate to help keep Jack in development of TweenLite. The amount you donate determines which plugins you can use in your projects as not all plugins come standard with TweenLite/Max.

Having read Jack’s blog recently, it seems that several Tweening Platforms (Twease and gTween) will be merging with TweenLite/Max. This is great news as TweenLite will benefit from the coorporation of the developers.

The latest stable version is Version 10, with Version 11 Beta in the works. Some of the new features from Version 11 Beta are:

• the addition of the “TimelineLite” and “TimelineMax” classes. They make building and managing sequences/groups of tweens simple.
• “useFrames” feature.
• a new “motionBlur” plugin that applies a realistic directional blur based on the velocity and angle of a DisplayObject’s x/y movement.
• a new “dynamicProps” plugin that allows you to associate a function with a property so that every time the tween is updated, it calls that function to get the end value for the associated property.

Having used TweenLite, I can vouch for it’s speed and size. All the signs for this project look very promising and I look forward to seeing how it develops over the coming months. Great work Jack!

For more information: GreenSock Tweening Platform

Having used osCommerce for several ecommerce online shops over the last few years, I had been waiting for the latest update since March 2007. A little over a month ago, that wait ended with the release of osCommerce Alpha 5. The update came with very little warning and even less fanfare. Regardless, I excitedly downloaded the latest version and installed it. Once it was installed, I took a look at the front end and found there was not much change other than it using CSS layouts. I didn’t think this was that much of a big deal as most online shops end up being completely redesigned.

I then took a look at the Administration system and was completely underwhelmed. There were hardly any new features. I found this strange, especially after two years between updates. The developer has stated that he has put alot of effort into making this flexible platform so that others can add functionality through contributions (or plugins). Bitterly disappointed, and not wanting to wait for the functionality to be created by others six months down the track, I decided to look at other alternatives.

I had read about Magento as it was mentioned several times on the osCommerce forums as a competitor. After looking at the Magento demo administration and front end, I’d thought I would give it a try. Now to be fair to osCommerce, I found Magento to be alot harder to install. I downloaded Magento v1.3. The first attempt at installing wouldn’t get passed the database creation step. It kept giving me an error. I checked all my database settings but couldn’t find anything wrong with them.  I did a search through the Magento forums and found other people were having the same problem. One suggestion was to just create a new database and user and use those during installation. Sure enough it worked. Strange thing was that I had created a new database and user just for Magento before my first install. Weird!

After the installation was done, I clicked on the link that takes you to the front end home page. Everything seemed to be working fine. I then logged into the Admin and started adding Categories and Products to see how it all works. This part of Magento is quite detailed. It combines the Product detail and SEO elements right from the start. I added my first product, saved it and then created a Category and added the Product to it. So far so good. Next step was to test out the front end with the newly added Category and Product. I typed in the URL for the front end. Up came the Home Page but no Category or Product. I went back into the Admin and checked what I had done but everything seemed to be in order. Tried the Home page again and still no Category menu or Product.

Magento Store Edit

I thought it might be the Default theme so I downloaded and installed the Modern theme (more on installing Extensions later in this article). Still no success. So like all good developers do, I hit the forums. Sure enough, I found what I was doing wrong. In the System->Manage Stores->Edit Store section I hadn’t set the root category for the store. Once I did this, Categories and Products were displayed on the Home Page.

Downloading extensions is pretty straight forward. You search through the Magento Extensions list and grab the extension key from the one you want. You then go into the Magento Connect Manager, enter the Extension Key and click on Install. The Extension is then downloaded and automatically installed.

You can filter the Extensions by choosing to see Core, Community or Commercial extensions. There are a plethora of Extensions already created. Extensions range from Payment Gateways to Administration Enhancements to Themes.

Another thing I like about the Administration System is it’s full of options that osCommerce doesn’t have. For example, you can set Roles for Users who log into the Administration System. You can set the Role to only access certain areas of the Administration System. This means that the Developer setting up the site can give access to the client but limit the areas they can access to avoid any accidental setup changes from being made. Magento also has in-built Google Sitemap creation, CMS management, URL rewrite management, Customer groups, report generation … the list goes on.

I’m still in the process of transferring an old osCommerce online shop across to Magento. However, from what I’ve seen so far, it outstrips osCommerce in terms of functionality and features that come standard. I would recommend Magento to any developer out there needing an Open Source ecommerce solution that provides them with the functionality and features they need right out of the box.

For more information: www.magentocommerce.com

Anyone who manages their own website knows how important it is to track the traffic coming to their site. There are several solutions out there, Google Analytics being the most well known. I wanted to see what other alternatives were out there.

After a bit of searching, I came across Piwik, an Open Source alternative to Google Analytics. After reading through the Piwik website, I thought I would give it a try.

Installation is very simple. Just upload the files to your webspace, and then access the installation URL. The Piwik installation will firstly perform a system check to make sure your system meets the minimum requirements. Next comes the Database access details. Once the Database is setup, your are then asked to enter the Super User details. Finally you are required to add a website URL to track.

For the tracking to work, you need to add Javascript to each page you want tracked. Tracking covers the standard things like vistors, unique visits, Bounce Rate, Browsers, location and so on. The one feature I really like is that all sections of Piwik are actually plugins. You can easily customise the information you see in Piwik by enabling/disabling the plugins. Expanded functionality in the future will be added via new plugins.

Piwik Dashboard

As this project is Open Source, it’s open to anyone who wishes to contribute. There are already several translations of the project. As Piwik is still in beta (currently at v0.2.33 as of writing this article), there is still a few months of development before v1.0 is reached. However, even at this early stage, I’m finding Piwik to be feature rich and quite stable. Some of the features the developers have planned to implement are:

• multi sites dashboard
• new modular Javascript API
• PDF reports

Piwik looks to be a promising alternative to Google Analytics. The developers have delivered a robust platform that will allow Piwik to grow with user contributions over coming months. Definitely worth taking a look at.

For more information: piwik.org

While reading through websites, I often come across people discussing Twitter, or information gleened from “tweets” (the name give to the short messages people write) from well known people in the computer industry. I always thought to myself “What is Twitter?”

About 4 weeks ago, I decided to take the plunge and see what Twitter was all about. I knew beforehand that it was a short messaging system where people basically write what they are currently doing. It felt very reminiscent of Facebooks’ “What’s on your mind?”. However, I never thought it of much value. Boy, was I wrong!

After creating my account, I started searching for people I would like to follow. I not only found people, but also businesses sending out their messages to the world. Having just started a home exchange for golfers business with my wife, I decided to create a Twitter account. As our business is golf related, I didn’t have much trouble finding other people interested in golf and so began to follow them. This proved to be a tedious chore as I had to click over and over again to select the “follow” option for each person.

By sheer chance, a person I was following sent out a Tweet with a link purporting to help you increase your followers. As this was exactly what I wanted to do to try and increase traffic to our website, I decided to follow the link.

Upon reading through the linked blog, it became clear that “the secret to getting more followers in Twitter” was actually a program called Hummingbird – The Automatic Twitter Follower. What Hummingbird does is automate the following/unfollowing process. Here is how it works:

1. Add your Twitter account details in Hummingbird and select an account from the Twitter Accounts dropdown menu. Hummingbird will auto login for you
2. Do a search for a keyword related to the people you would like to follow (“golf” in our instance)
3. Choose a person/entity with a large number of followers and click on their followers list
4. Select Follow All from the Hummingbird menu and away it goes.

The principle behind all this is simple. When you are followed by someone, the Twitter Ettiquette demands that you then follow that person back. Of course, not everyone adheres to this Ettiquette. So, if you follow 1000 people, normally you should get anywhere from 200 to 400 people following back. So by following as many people as possible who you think would be interested in your Business theme, you then get a large portion of them following you back. As a result, whenever you tweet a link, it will be seen by thousands, if not tens of thousands of people. Even if only a few percent click on your link, you are guaranteed of getting hundreds of hits.

As you get more and more followers, you will notice an increase in traffic to your site. We noticed quite an increase in traffic to our site after we started increasing our followers.

Now to stop what Twitter terms “aggressive following”, which is basically you following thousands of Twitter accounts in one go, there is a limit to how many followings you can have. This limit is based on the number of people following you. The higher the number of followers you have, the more people you can follow. This is where Hummingbird comes to the rescue.

Every couple of days, once the number of followers has slowed down, you need to unfollow people who haven’t followed you back. This will decrease your following number, allowing you to follow a fresh batch of Twitter accounts. All you have to do is.

1. Click on the “Following” link on your Twitter account Home page
2. Select Unfollow All

Hummingbird will automatically start going through the list of accounts you are following and unfollow those who haven’t followed you back. Hummingbird will even remember those accounts you unfollow so you won’t accidently follow them again in the future. Once this task is completed, search again using your keyword, select an account with a large amount of followers and set Hummingbird going. Rinse and repeat. It’s as simple as that.

One other great feature of Hummingbird is the ability to stop people you are following from being unfollowed. For example, you may be interested on following Ashton Kutcher, but with now over 1,000,000 accounts following him, it’s a slim chance that he will follow you back. To stop Hummingbird from removing an account automatically from your “followings” list, you can add it to your Hummingbird VIP list.

Hummingbird is a great little application. It’s a simple idea but really takes the slog work out of building up your followers. For any of you reading this who want to help kick start their business and get their message out their, or for those already on Twitter and having problems getting followers, I highly recommend you check Hummingbird out.

For more information on Hummingbird – The Automatic Twitter Follower: www.twitaddict.com

For those wanting to follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ghexchange

As a Freelance Developer, I’m always searching for new things to use in the next job. Often it’s little things that save time, or that implement a cool feature into the design of a site. Sometimes I stumble across things that I can’t believe I didn’t know about before. These are the things I would like to share with you.

With this site, I hope to cover things such as Social Networking (Twitter, Facebook etc), Open Source Applications, Flash (AS3/4), PHP, mySQL, Javascript APIs and some entertaining links along the way.

I welcome any discussion on the subjects I write about, and hope I can help some of you reach solutions without spending hours “Googling” for the answer.