Creating custom Timeline Effects

[abeall]

Is there any decent documentation or tutorial on how to create a custom Timeline Effect? I can't seem to find anything on it in the Extending Flash help. Searching the web hasn't worked because everything I find is naturally about how to apply a Timeline Effect(ooo tricky stuff!). I did find a book on extending Flash that had a chapter on Timeline Effects, but I'm not inclined to buy a whole book. I just want a bullet list of "file here, JSFL here, SWF here, SWF works like this, these events are fired when user does blah, JSFL is triggered when whatever, etc.

Any tips? I'm thinking about just recreating the wheel and making a command that also saves a bit of custom data to the symbol to allow editing it later via the same command.

[abeall]

Despite the fact I use Flash to create motion graphics all the time, I've never used the Timeline Effects -- after some fooling around with them I think I've figured out why I haven't:

1) There aren't very many effects. I don't expect to discover much there.

2) The effects that are there aren't particularly useful. I've never really needed to "explode" or "expand" something in my animation. Some of the effects are so basic they don't seem to really offer any benefit over normal tweening, such as Transform and Transition. And what about Text effects? If there were professional text effects, such as the quality found in After Effects(not the various cheasy flash text effect generators we've all seen churn out annoying banners with), I'd find that useful.

3) The effects that exist are not very high quality. They aren't smooth and natural looking.

4) The preview framerate is not synchronized to your movie framerate, so the preview is mostly useless.

5) UI visibility of the Timeline Effect is really low. There's no indication in the timeline or Property panel that a symbol is actually a timeline effect. The only way to edit or create a timeline effect is through a menu. This makes for a very awkward interface.

6) You can only have a single Timeline Effect at once.

7) A Symbol with a Timeline Effect can't be edited, you can't even adjust the frame span in the timeline without the timeline effect being "baked" and not editable anymore. This makes some of the "helpers" particularly useless, since it basically locks down your selection after being applied.

The first 4 problems could be solved by extenders, the last 3 problems I can't solve. So in the end I think I'll avoid extending Timeline Effects altogether and just create some Commands to help us in creating tweens.