Unit 3.  The Working Environment

The Views or Zooms

The Zoom Tool is used to approach or move away the object view, allowing to include more or less zone of the Work Area. Every time we click in the Zoom Tool we duplicate the percentage indicated in the Zooms Panel.

Zooms Panel: It is a set of direct accesses to the View's submenus. They are very useful and help to accelerate the work when they are used correctly.

In order to know more about the Zooms visit our Basic Page

The Panels

The Panels are command sets grouped according their function (for example, all that makes references to the actions, will be in the "Actions" Panel). It's mission is to simplify and facilitate the commands use.

All of them will be studied deeply during the course. Even so, we'll name them and summarize the functions of most of them.

Align Panel: It places the objects like we indicate to it. It is very useful.

Color Mixer Panel: Using this panel we'll create the colors that we like more.

Color Swatches Panel: It allows us to select a color quickly and graphically. (Including our creations).

Info Panel: It shows the size and the coordinates of the selected objects, with the possibility of modification. It is very useful for exact alignments.

Scene Panel: It modifies the attributes of the scenes that we use.

If you still do not know what are the Scenes, we explain it to you in our basic theme

Transform Panel: It scales, shrinks, rotates... the selected objects

Actions Panel: It is very helpful when you use Action Script and associate actions to our movie.

Behaviors Panel: They allow one to assign to certain objects a series of characteristics (behaviors) that later could be stored to be applied to other objects fastly and efficiently.

Components Panel: It allows us to access to the already constructed and ready to be used Components that Flash provides. The components are "intelligent" objects with characteristic properties and many utilities (calendars, scrolls etc...)

Strings Panel: Flash 8 contributes multi-language base to our movie through this panel.

Help Panel: Macromedia gives us help and accessible advises from this panel.

Properties Panel: With no doubt it is the most used panel and the most important. It shows us the properties of the object selected at this moment: border, background color, line type, characters size, typography, objects properties (if there are interpolations...), coordinates, size etc... It is fundamental, you must never forget about it.

Movies Explorer Panel: It allows us to access to all the movie contents easily and quickly

In order to practice this operations we advise you to realize Exercise Access to the Panels

  Exercises Unit 3.

  Unit 3 Test.