The company Methinks has hit the Flash MX market with a bundle of four new components called Scooter. Chuck Timmerman, the founder of Methinks, calls it Scooter because, "It is your vehicle for making cool moves on the Flash stage!" Scottmanning.com takes a look to see just how cool those moves are.
The four different components offer developers the ability to take any object and fade, move, rotate, or zoom it. While those four effects sound simple and can be done very easily in Flash already, Scooter offers more advanced capabilities for these effects that were previously only possible with some very complicated ActionScripting. Multiple simple actions are taken and put together in one interface allowing developers to create very complex effects.
The components offer the ability to control:
Brightness
Alpha
Number of frames for the effect
Number of bounces
Destination
Stiffness
Degrees
x and y coordinates
H eight
Width
Constrained proportions
And the final touch is the ability to add random effects that give the actions a more life-like feel instead of the computer generated feel that comes from plain motion tweens.
The interface Scooter's interface is very simple to use and understand. Each different effect has its own color which will come in handy if you start using these components regularly.
While the color coding will be helpful for differentiating between the effects, the red and blue backgrounds made reading the text a little hard. Here's a sample of the red:
Though the coloring of the interfaces will have no effect on the final output, they are a little annoying.
Time and file size Putting the effects into use is a quick process. It's just a matter of dragging and dropping, setting some parameters, and that's it. This effect was done in seconds:
While implementing an effect is easy, getting the effect perfect may take some trial and error as you try and master all the different settings.
The file size is very impressive. The above Flash file is only 4 KB. Most of that is taken up by the Scottmanning.com logo itself. Scooter offers the ability to export to both Flash 5 and Flash 6 players, but Flash 5 will be a little larger due not having the ability to be compressed.
Conclusion While some may find the $39.95 price tag a little steep, these components will definitely improve the workflow of those who are continually making effects in their Flash movies.
If you're still unsure, Methinks has a live demonstration on their site that people can try to see Scooter in action.
The company 
