Subtitles of the Movie

The productivity enhancements in Flash are numerous. In this chapter we are going to take a look at few of the most prominent changes and see how they will help you, the developer, work with this powerful tool. My favorite productivity enhancement has got to be the property inspector. If you use Flash for any length of time you know finding all the appropriate settings often meant searching through several pallets, which often left to missing a setting or two. Flash MX changes all that by bringing the most important options in a context sensitive window known as "the property inspector." After using Flash MX for a short time I quickly fell in love with the property inspector. This one panel almost always has the most relevant settings for the object I have selected at the time. Let's take a quick tour of the property inspector. If it is not already selected on your stage, generally you'll it see here down at the bottom, then be sure to go to the window menu and select properties. You can also use the keyboard shortcut which is command F3 on a Macintosh or ctrlF3 on a PC. When you select that, you'll notice that it appears at the bottom of your stage. In this current form with no object selected on the stage it shows the information about your movie; such as the movie size, the background color, frame rate and what Flash player you're selecting with this movie or for this movie. It's all pretty basic stuff; but where the property inspector really shines is by providing you, at a glance, with a wealth of information and settings appropriate to the object you currently have selected on the stage. Let's take a look at this by adding a few objects to the stage. I'll add a shape, a button and a symbol. Now by clicking on any of these objects you'll see the property inspector change to reflect those settings that are available to that object. For instance, I'll click on the shape and notice it does show down here in the property inspector it is a shape and see that the fill color is selected but the stroke color appears empty. And that's because of course I clicked a single click on the shape. To include the stroke color remember you'll need to double click. When I double click it now appears in the property inspector showing the size of the stroke, I can change that; showing the type of stroke, I can change that; and showing of course the color; that can be changed as well. Let's click on the button. Notice the button has quite a bit more information available to you. It does show an icon representing the button and the type of symbol that it is. You can change it to a movie clip or graphic but let's just leave it as a button at this time. Later as we get into action script we'll notice that this "instance name" is used quite a bit. This is where you would select the object on the stage and then the property inspector change the instance name. There are other options such as color and the instance that you can change which we won't do right now. Finally, let's click on the symbol and notice that it does show it as a symbol; we can tell by looking that it is a graphic symbol. Ofcourse you have a graphic button or a movie clip; in this case in one glance we can see that this is a graphic symbol. And again you have other options available to you. Let's take a look down here at the text however, and notice that this text is static text and has no border, where as these two do have a border around them. Property inspector let's you click on one text box and in a moments notice you can see not only the type of text that it is, static in this case, but also the font used, the color, the size, bold, italic and so on. Quite a bit information available in the property inspector. But what is this border around this button? I wanted them all to be same but this one came out differently. By clicking I can see that it is dynamic text and is not static as it should be. This one over here, which has a word symbol on it, is an input text box. We can change these symbols in the property inspector by simply clicking on the drop down combo box and selecting static text. Let's do the same for the middle, change it to static, click away from the instance and notice that all of our text boxes are now static as we wanted it. This shows that the property inspector not only can be used for gathering information but it can also be an important part of working with your objects on the stage. The second runner up for timesaving, in my opinion, is the panels and panel sets. Although the property inspector is pretty powerful, it represents the most commonly used functions at your finger tips, but it cannot always give you every option available in a Flash development environment. This is where panels come into play. The window menu lists the various panels that are available to you in the authoring environment. Panels such as the line, color mixer swatches, action's debugger, movie explorer reference and so on. Selecting one of these from the window menu will bring up a separate floating panel. You can either leave your panels floating independent like this; or, if you click on the drag region, you can select this panel and add it to your master panel by dragging and dropping. Now note that the scene panel, which we selected from the window menu, is now docked conveniently in our master panel. This can be minimized by twisting the triangle to the close position. If we decide we no longer want this panel in our master panel, we can simply drag it out to where it's back in the floating stage and click the close button. Macromedia has included with every version of Flash several panel sets. Panel sets are simply a layout, a screen layout, with those options most commonly associated with designers or developers. Let's select the panel set and choose the designer 1024x768 size. Notice that it shows designer or developer and the resolution of the screen for quick reference. Let's select the panel set that matches my screen resolution; for this tutorial I have my resolution 800x600 so I had to create a custom set. You'll note that the screen resets itself, property inspector is open and all the different panels that are appropriate to a developer open up on the right hand side in the master panel. ] so I had to create a custom set. You'll note that the screen resets itself, property inspector is open and all the different panels that are appropriate to a developer open up on the right hand side in the master panel.