Another set of Flash commands by request. I’ve had these on my machine for a while but haven’t released them. This extension contains 3 commands to accelerate the process of working with names in Flash. One command names your layer based on the content (assuming there’s only one object on the layer), the second command automatically names an instance by the name its library symbol, and the third copies the name of the selected symbol to the clipboard so that it can be quickly pasted into Actionscript. All of these commands are intended to be used most efficiently with keyboard shortcuts.
The auto-naming for layers also recognizes layers with actions and labels (and automatically locks them).
I’d written an extension a while back that Convert a Timeline into a Symbol. David Stiller sent me a note yesterday wondering if I had an extension to do the opposite: break a symbol out onto a timeline (and retain the symbol’s layers). I didn’t have one yet, but it sounded like an interesting challenge, and something that I could certainly have used on a few past projects. So, a few hours after work I had something together, and here it is.
When I’m working quickly, I’ll often find that I’ve swapped or duplicated the wrong symbol and my library names have gone haywire. In order to switch two names, you have give one a temporary name, since they can’t both have the same name at the same time. I wrote this extension to speed up that process. It takes two library symbols and switches their names. Nothing special…just a time saver.
I found out this week that I will be presenting a lab at Adobe MAX 2009 conference in LA (Oct. 4-7). I attended MAX for the first time last year and it was jammed with interesting sessions. MAX was originally aimed at developers, but it’s grown to include designers and other professionals. It’s a large price tag, but if you only go to one conference per year, I would recommend this one. The lab that I’m presenting this year is entitled, “Building Extensions in Flash CS4.” Here’s the description:
Learn about Flash’s History panel and how to translate user actions into dynamic Flash extensions. We’ll go through the basics of Flash JavaScript (JSFL), how JSFL relates to the Flash authoring environment, and how to use loops and basic logic to make powerful batch commands. After creating an extension, we’ll cover how to package an extension for distribution.
If you’re interested in working with Flash commands, learning more about JSFL, building extensions, or distributing extensions to others, come check out the lab!
One idea that I had when creating the MotionSketch extension was that it could be used to do write-on effects. I was going to write an Actionscript class to demo this effect prior to releasing MotionSketch but ran out of time. So I tweaked a version of vCam to quickly demo the effect for the MotionSketch video tutorial. Thanks to a reader’s email, I was reminded that I still had yet to write this class. It’s now written and free to download. I’m calling it MotionBrush to keep it in the family with MotionSketch and MotionBlur. It’s super simple to use. Check out the video tutorial:
I just saw that David Blatner has featured my Merge Textframes script on his Lynda.com course, InDesign CS4: 10 Free Must-Have Scripts. I highly recommend David Blatner’s Real World books if you’re looking to go from knowing a topic/application fairly well to becoming an expert. I’ve read ten of thousands of pages in software and design books and David Blatner’s books have been among the best. It’s very cool to see something I made appear on Lynda.com (also a great resource) and it’s twice the honor to have it posted by David Blatner.
Advanced animation techniques in Flash often make use of nested symbols. It can make animating objects much simpler and leave timelines cleaner and easier to work with. Often in these animations, it’s helpful to sync the nested symbol’s timeline with its parent timeline. That way, complex animation can be built within a symbol and animated independently without adding tons of layers to the main timeline. This technique is frequently used in character animation to segment a character’s moving parts.
The difficulty then becomes going through each keyframe and setting the startFrame property (listed in the Property inspector as First). This can be quite tedious over hundreds or thousands of frames. The request for this extension came from an animator on the Cold Hard Flash forum. It will search selected frames for graphic symbols and set their startFrame property to match the timeline.
