Flash Hack A Custom Color Transform Class

Consider enhancing this custom class to implement additional features, such as:

• Making theRATE value user-definable.

   

• Adding controls to repeat the transitions. This would allow blinking or other repetitive effects.
  
• Adding more complex methods that involve more than one movie clip, allowing cross-fades between two movie clips. This would introduce some powerful effects useful with video.

The use of ActionScript 2.0 allows you to create new features that can be accessed via methods of new classes. This is the preferred way of building up libraries of commonly used features not native to ActionScript.

For many designers, the ActionScript 2.0 OOP coding style may initially seem a little long-winded because more lines of code seem to be concerned with building up the code structure than actually solving the problem at hand, especially for modest classes. This extra structure is, however, a real advantage in the long term. It gives you a structured way to make your code flexible enough to reuse in several different applications and also makes your code easier to transfer to other users (which is particularly useful in a design environment consisting of an ActionScript coder and several non-scripting designers).

Finally, although OOP code may appear longer than other styles of code, the compiled bytecode can be more efficient [Hack #100]. Flash Player 7 is optimized for OOP code. Benchmarking of well-written OOP code against procedural ActionScript shows that OOP can increase performance through the greater use of local variables and passing of data as arguments, both of which tend to create more optimized bytecode. 

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