Subtitles of the Movie

A lot of your work in Fireworks will be done in its many Windows or Panels. Panels are the free-floating controls that I have open here. They help you edit aspects of a selected object, or elements of the document. Panels let you work on frames, layers, symbols, color swatches, behaviors, and much, much more. Each panel, notice, is drag-able on the interface. I can also resize the panels by going to the edge of the panel and clicking and dragging. They are also drag-able in the sense that I can group them into different combinations. Notice my Optimize and Align panels are together. They can be closed by clicking in the upper right-hand corner. Now to gain an understanding of the scope of Fireworks CS3, let me give you a quick overview of the more important of the program's panels. Let's start with the Optimize Panel. By the way you can open up these panels from the Window menu, it optimizes near the top there. This panel lets you manage the settings that control a file's size and file type. You can also work with the color palette of the file, or the slice to be important. The Layers panel is next, a very important panel. This organizes a document's structure and contains options for creating, deleting, and manipulating layers. We also have the Frames panel, right there. The Frames panel displays the frames in the current file and includes options for creating animations. Notice that in this case, Frame 2 doesn't have my text. Let's go ahead and close these panels. Next we have the History panel. The History panel lists commands you have recently used so that you can quickly undo and redo them. In this case I changed some frames, I added some pages, and so I can go back using this slider and undo all those actions, or redo them. Next is the Auto Shapes panel. This contains auto shapes that are not displayed in the Tools panel, so let's drag out a little posable figure, or resolve path, or ruler. Styles panel is next. That's right here. Notice that the Styles panel is grouped with my Shapes panel. This lets you set the style of an object that you've selected on the canvas there. Let's go ahead and stylize this object. This is a good example of how you can very quickly change the appearance of the selected object. It works with text as well. Then we have the Library panel. This contains graphic symbols, buttons, animation symbols, that you can drag onto your document. I have an example of a Nav bar as PNG file that has a lot of these buttons. I simply drag them onto the stage there. The URL panel is adjacent to that. This lets you create libraries containing frequently used URLs, for example, going to page 1 or page 2, page 48. URLs can only be applied to Hotspots or Slices. So, let's go ahead and go back here to this document where I have quite a number of slices. Notice that I can now apply the URL very easily by using the URL panel there. Color-mixer panel lets you create new colors to add to the current document's color palette, or to apply the colors to selected objects. The Swatches panel is related. This manages the current document's color palette. Continuing down my list, we now come to the Info panel. This provides information about the dimensions of selected objects, and the exact coordinates of the pointer as you move it across the canvas. Let's go ahead and turn off my slices and this object here has a width of 104 pixels, a height of 120. This one has a height of 237. The Behaviors panel is next. Let me move to another document here to demonstrate the Behaviors panel. The Behaviors panel manages behaviors, which determine what Hotspots and Slices do in response to mouse movement. So let's turn on my Slices and Hotspots again, and let's click some of these. Notice there is a mouse-over behavior, another mouse-over behavior; there's a swap image behavior, we probably have some more hidden in here somewhere. There's another Swap image behavior. Next we have the Find panel. Continuing down my menu. This lets you search for and replace elements such as text, URLs, fonts, and colors. Next is the Align panel. This is one of my favorite panels. And if I go to this Nav bar here, to demonstrate this, this will allow you to line up various elements and components as well as space them evenly and distribute them. I like that one a lot. Look how that's distributed all those buttons in the Nav bar. Let's align these three. First let's align center, and now let's distribute them equally, that evens the spaces between them. So this panel contains controls for aligning and distributing objects on the canvas. The next panel in our list is the Auto Shape properties panel. This lets you make changes to the properties of an auto shape after you insert one into your document. I have an auto shape here. Notice that I can change the outer radius of that donut, I can also insert Auto Shapes. Let's change the inner radius of that one to 700, and that changed it somehow. I can, for example, change the arrow width here to 600, makes that very wide; change the tip length to 300, like so. Let's go ahead and close these panels down. Now if I move my Fireworks application window all the way over to the right of my computer and then choose Window, Others, you can see some kind of hidden panels, including color palette, Image Editing. This panel organizes common tools and options used for bitmap editing onto one panel, and then underneath that is the Path panel. This provides quick access to many path-related commands, and then lastly, is Special Characters. This is one of my favorite hidden panels. This displays the special characters that can be used in text blocks. So that'll give you a summary then of some of the more important of Fireworks CS3's many working panels.