Getting Organized


Some handy tricks to get your Flash Developers Workbench organized ...

If You have great Tips and Tricks ... Please add them


Control Panels

One of the hassels in the beginning with Flash5 was the way the used Control Panels and even ended up in a conflict with Adobe about it ...
What I did from one of the first days was dragging all my groups of Control panels into one big CP that i could close or place at the bottom of the screen.

If you are rather new to Flash you might wanna try this little trick.

Open Up all Control Panels and drag them all into on window you choose. Organize them so you have the one you use most at the beginning and group them accordingly.

Down Under You have direct shortcuts to the Action Panel and the Library and a few others like TEXT. Just by clicking on it it fires up all CP's at once and you don't have to bother about which one where and a complete mixed up screen.


CTRL + S

Flash does NOT have a build in autosave function like mikeysoft has on most of his products. Therefore it's important you save your worked at a regular time interval. It also gives you the possibility to go back to older versions.
I ussually use following scheme.
I start working on something and call it newproject001.fla and hit save every 15/30 minutes (CTRL + S)
This assures that in case of a crash of Flash (and yes it happens) you only lost max 30 minutes.

After every major step / improvement I go up on version. So it becomes newproject002.fla. I also do this just before I want to start at something new.

At the end of the day (hmmm I don't do it daily ... but with big project i definitly do it) zip all the files and copy them to another computer // physical HD.

Once in a while if you are not working for a company with a serious BackUp policy burn your work on a CD Rom.

NEVER delete a FLA file unless you have it backed up somewhere on tape or CD. Trust me on this ... the day will come that you need it.

STARTUP FLA

This is a time saver ...
Since you can easily exchange actors between FLA files it's a really good idea to start with your own STARTUP FLA.

So on a rainy day you create this well organized FLA with some cool actors in, a few empty buttons and some nifty code together with your copyright notice and some other cool things ...

Whenever you start on a new project you open this Mother of all FLA's and you do save as if it's gonna be a big project or you just drag the things you need to the new fla you are working on ...
And if you created some new code in a movie ... you just add it to the Mother of all FLA's ... your STARTUP FLA.

More to come ... if you want

Greetz

Knuff

<FONT COLOR="#000000" SIZE="1">[ June 01, 2001 05:55 AM: Message edited by: knuffel ]</font>