I was just in a bug review meeting and discovered three buttons in the library panel that I never realized were there. The first button re-sorts the library alphabetically, the second automatically expands the width of the library to show all columns, and the third narrows the width of the library.

Here’s a picture.

Go figure…

During a customer visit in Tokyo today a Flash user requested the ability to have Flash automatically save all of his open .as files when he hits the “Test Project” button. I wrote the feature down thinking, “Geez - how’d we miss that one?” Upon return to my hotel room to fire up Flash, I discovered that we didn’t actually miss that one - we just burried it in the preferences.

Go to Edit > Preferences and select the “Editing” tab. Towards the bottom you can check the option to, “Save project files on test project or publish project”.

Phew!

BTW - It’s becoming increasingly clear to me, during our numerous customer visits in planning for 8Ball, that we don’t do a very good job of surfacing many of the very useful features and prefs in Flash. We’ll see what we can do about that in the future. Any suggestions are welcomed.

I just learned of this - thanks to Robert Hoekman Jr. If you want to move the symbol-editing breadcrumb trail/stage zoom drop-down from above the timeline to it’s old position of below the timeline, just hold down ALT+SHIFT and Double-Click on the breadcrumb trail.
Default:

Alternative:

Thanks Robert!

I can’t believe I didn’t know this one until one of our engineers pointed it out during a customer visit last week.

You can use the Movie Explorer to step through all of the textfields in your FLA and change the text.

Just do the following:
1. Open the Movie Explorer from Window > Other Panels > Movie Explorer
2. Make sure that the “Show Text” button is checked.
3. Check the following options from the “Options Menu” in the upper-right-hand-corner of the Movie Explorer -
- Show Movie Elements
- Show Symbol Definitions
- Show all scenes

Now you can browse to any textfield, double-click on the text, and edit it right there…

Enjoy!

You have probably noticed lately that Mike Chambers and I are starting to post some of the little (sometime hidden) “Flash gems” that tend to make users’ lives so much better. The idea was sparked after we visited with a designer who was importing dozens of PNGs onto the stage and then manually copy/pasting them on to seperate layers. I just pointed out the “Distribute to Layers” command and the response was something like, “Oh my God, that is going to save me so much time!”.

So, on that note, we’ve decided to run a little, unofficial contest. Basically, we’d like all of you to post little tips and tricks that may be unknown by a lot of users. These can be workflow related, hacks to overcome limitations, better ways of doing certain common practices (ie: importing an .AI file instead of exporting to SWF from Illustrator, or something of that nature).

Mike Chambers and I will be the judges and will post the finalists some time in the coming week or two. The person that we determine to have the best “Flash Gem” will win a box of Flash MX 2004 books and perhaps a few other goodies.

Let the games begin!

Some of you may have noticed that we have implemented a new documentation format in the latest release of the Flash Remoting components. We are referring to this format as the “new ASDoc format”.

This is a new format similar to the format used in the documentation for Macromedia Flex, which was modeled after the JavaDoc format.

This should have very little, if any, effect on users. We just wanted to be clear that we are not releasing a new functionality or capability in the authoring tool. We are looking into further supporting this new documentation format in the authoring tool for future releases but we are planning nothing new in the short-term.

We have released updated Remoting components, including an AS2 re-write and the inclusion of a new Remoting Connector Component.

Get them for free here:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashremoting/downloads/components/

I’m sure this has been mentioned in other blogs, but it’s worth mentioning again. This is a great tutorial written by Dan Carr in conjunction with Macromedia’s Multimedia Marketing team.

There is a lot to learn about Flash development in this article. Please take some time to download the files and step through it.

http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/flash/articles/vidgal_structure.html

This is an old technote but I was asked about this by a customer at the NAB show this week. Apparently, when installing an ActiveX control through IE on Windows it will ask you (not require you) to restart your machine if the ActiveX control that you were installing/upgrading was already in use when you began the installation. This means that Flash developers should not put any Flash content on their pages that launch visitors in a new browser window over to the player install page on macromedia.com.

I thought it would be nicest to bring this up to eveyone again, in case you weren’t aware. Read the technote here:
http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/ts/documents/ie_reboot.htm

This is a really cool piece of software. I’ve seen several demonstrations and it just blows my mind. SmartSound SonicFire Pro is well known in the video space, but it’s now branching into the Flash world. This software intelligently creates very customized music loops and soundtracks for multimedia and video projects - including the ability to customize the music to fit an exact amount of time. It comes with a library of music themes that can be mixed and matched to perfectly fit a given subject. Worth looking into…