Flash MX - Page 4

Whether you're designing motion graphics or building data-driven applications, Flash MX has the tools you need. New video and color management tools extend your creative capabilities. Development time is reduced through the use of pre-built templates, UI components, an improved timeline and integration with both Freehand and Fireworks.

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Creating professional looking sites is easier than ever in Flash MX. The product ships with pre-built templates for presentations, photo albums, ads, menus and more! You can also save your own designs for use as templates.

Work Flow

Flash fans and newbies alike are going to be thrilled with the new user interface in the latest release of Flash MX. Most noticeable to oldtimers will be the re-designed panels.

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The tabbed editing controls in Flash are now collapsible panels that can be arranged and combined to the users preferences. No more sorting through a hodge-podge of multiple panels looking for a particular object. Locating that illusive panel, while perhaps not a delight is no longer the nightmare of days gone by. Don't care for quite this much organization? Not to worry, the panels can still be un-docked and placed where you like.

The new Property Inspector is quite possibly the best thing to happen to Flash MX. It's context-sensitive, changing options depending upon what has been selected. If you select a frame, frame and tweening options are available; select text and text options appear. Talk about a space saver, everything you need in one panel!

Looking at just one of these property panels gives an idea of their versatility. The Text Property inspector allows you to view fonts in the text you're going to publish rather than the font name; a handy little button allows you to specify if the text will run vertical or horizontal.

The Timeline has been enhanced to include nested folders that can be collapsed or expanded, improved cursor feedback for moving, adjusting and resizing frames, cutting and pasting of multiple frames, and cell-based and object-based editing modes.

Use the Distribute to Layers to move multiple selected objects. The selections will be moved to their respective layers and named based on their content! For example, if the object is a symbol, bitmap, or text, the new layer will share the same name. Why is this whole thing a big deal? Imagine, which would you rather do, create multiple layers by hand and paste an object into place... or do it all in one simple keystroke? I didn't think I'd hear any arguments there.

The drag-and-drop interface of the Shared Libraries allows the user to easily share symbols across multiple documents. Flash MX automatically tracks symbols as they are copied from one document to another. When updating an original symbol, the user can choose to either manually or automatically update the referring symbols to the latest version.

Design Tools

The new Free Transform Tool and Envelope Modifier provides added flexibility in design creation. Transform graphic objects, groups, text blocks, and instances. The Transform tool is great for scaling, rotating, skewing and distorting. The Envelope Modifier provides additional handles for greater flexibility, allowing you to push, pull, distort and twist

Another new feature is Pixel Snapping, which provides precise object placement, down to the exact pixels. When the stage is zoomed to 400% or higher, a pixel grid is displayed.

Complex effects can be easily created with the Flash MX Dynamic Masking feature. Use movie clip symbols for animated mask effects, or script your mask with ActionScript.

Text

Missing font Substitution will pop up an alert box indicating missing fonts the first time a scene is displayed on the stage. (Naturally, this only works if the scene is missing fonts). Options to substitute a different font or accept the default mappings are provided. The Font Mapping dialog box, which opens when you select to substitute fonts, lists all of the missing fonts in the document and lets you select substitutes.

The Break Apart command breaks text apart into separate editable letters. Choose Break Apart again to convert the characters to editable shapes. The intermediate step makes creating and updating text animations much simpler.

Create Vertical Text with the click of a button! That's right, you can now create vertical text in Flash MX simply by selecting it in the Property Inspector! This is a particularly useful feature for any language, but critical for Asian languages such as Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

Dreamweaver MX and Internet Applications - Page 3
Studio MX
Learning Resources - Page 5