Subtitles of the Movie

Fireworks has a number of panel and windows over here to the right that help you with certain aspects of the selected objects or elements of the document. Panels lets you work on states, layers, symbols, color swatches and much much more. Each panel can be opened and then dragged off here so it's a free floating window and then also re-docks back into the panel cluster over here to the right by dragging it over until you see that blue line there. Let me review very quickly some of the more important of the panels starting with the Optimize panel at the top, I briefly introduced you to the Optimize panel in the previous movie, this panel lets you manage the settings that control the file size and the file type. It also lets you work with the color palette of the file or slice to be exported. Notice that I simply click on this little icon, the double triangle icon pointing to the right to bring that back into the panel stack over here. Next, we have the History panel, this list is a list of commands that you've recently used so that you can quickly undo and redo those commands. The Align panel is relatively interesting, this is very similar to one that is in Flash in fact it originated in Flash. Now it's come over to Fireworks but notice if I misalign these various buttons in the menu and then I select those buttons, I can align them so their left edges are even, so that they're aligned along their center or to their right edge. Let's go ahead and select more of those and let's align them to the right edge and now those align back in line with the others, so that's the Align panel. The Pages panel is next, this displays the pages in the current file and contains options for manipulating pages, pages are ways to organize a web site, you can have actually one file represents a web site and then each page here is a page of that web site. Next, we have the States panel, this is previously known as the Frames panel in older versions of Fireworks, this displays the states in the current file, and includes options for creating animations. For example, if I go back to this file here, I have two states, a state with yellow text and a state with white text, notice if I'm here in the preview view I can actually see for this slice up here the two states, there's a simple rollover behavior attached to this slice, let's go ahead and turn on the slices view right there, another one of the panels, it's not visible over here in the stack is the Window behaviors panel one of my favorites down here. And I've added, let's go ahead and bring this up and close these other panels, you can see how I can manipulate these, I've added a simple rollover behavior so that it changes when I roll over that slice from state 1 to state 2. A little bit more clear without the slices there, if I go to preview and see that quite clearly, so that's the States panel and the Behaviors panel. Let's go ahead and close that one and bring that one back into the stack there. The Layers panel is next, this organizes a document's structure and contains options for creating, deleting, and manipulating layers, you'll notice that this document has quite a number of layers. Next, we have the Styles panel which lets you store and reuse combinations of object characteristics or select a stock style, then the color palette which gives you the ability to create and swap color palettes, export custom ACT color swatches, explore various color schemes as well as access commonly used controls for choosing colors. Then the Swatches panel manages the current document's color palette. The Path panel in the next section here provides quick access to many path related commands, notice that these are combined and organized into commands for combining paths, altering paths, editing points in the path as well as selecting points in a path, you could probably spend a week just learning all the tools here in this panel. Then we have the Image editing panel, this organizes common tools and options that are used for bitmap editing. We have transform tools, transform commands, adjusting colors, filters, and then view options, each of these has additional commands, another one you could probably spend a week really learning. The Special characters panel displays the special characters that you can use in text blocks, then we have the Shapes panel, this contains auto shapes that are not displayed in the Tools panel over here. You just drag and drop them like so, notice that there is a calendar, a moon, like so. These are vector shapes so they can be resized without distortion, rotated and so on. Notice that these same panels can also be accessed via the Window menu, there is Optimize, Layers, Common Library, Pages, Stages, History, Color swatches, Find, Behaviors, Align and so on. So there you have a review of the more important of Fireworks windows and panels, let me now move on to the next movie and give an overview of the difference between vector graphics and bitmap graphics.