Flash's 3rd Party Toolbox: Plugins aren't just for Photoshop Anymore
There comes a time in any Flash animator's life where they've gotten totally used to Flash's capabilities and yet are still left... wanting. Man I really wish it could make lip syncing easier, man I really wish tween easing could be stronger, man I really wish I didn't have to use this fucking program.
Unfortunately, this article can't help you with that last one, but it can direct to to a few places to help smooth the jagged edges of Flash's sharp, broken-bottle experience.
For a long while now Photoshop has had a litany of plugins which has always left me in a state of jealousy, but no more! As there are actually a couple of sites that brandish some fantastic Flash plugins for animators or developers, many of which are actually free.
The first of the three on our list, Toonmonkey's extensions are free and provide a variety of little tweaks and hacks to make some of the more daunting tasks a bit easier to manage. His offerings include a Virtual Timing Chart for those used to traditional animation; FrameEDIT and FrameEXIT, which remember what frame you were last editing inside a symbol; and TraceSequence which can batch-trace bitmap images across multiple frames.
All of his plugins are free and work with Flash MX or higher. They're mostly time saving plugins with no realy major features to each of them, but they're good for Flash developers that are struggling to make a crunch.
Ajar's offerings range from free to commercial, but are a bit more feature packed and aimed towards the animator crowd. His extensions include FrameScrub, which can be useful for things like lipsyncing or Graphic-symbol based libraries; Convert Timeline to Symbol, which does what it says on the tin and wraps the selected frames into a Symbol; and QueasyTools which gives tween easing a bit more flexibility.
Some of Ajar's extensions do not work with Flash MX, for compatibility be sure to check the grid on the main site before you download them.
TrickOrScript is the big dog of the three. Their plugins have been commercially used by dozens of animation studios such as Disney, AniBoom and PopCap. Only one or two of his Plugins are free, and are basically features that later versions of Flash already have (like autosave). But their Plugins are true heavy-hitters that can make animation in flash suck much, much less; Such as their current champion, Custom Brush, which provides something I've wanted since Flash was owned by Macromedia; Ease easily, which also expands the limits of easing like Ajar's QueasyTools, but to an even greater extent; and Tween Plus, which allows you to place multiple tweens within the same layer.
If you've got the cash, definitely invest in a few of these. If you're wary of dropping 30$ on them, you can download a free trial version of them on their Downloads page and see if they're worth your coin.
