Flash CS3 user interface issues

October 15, 2009 2:57 PM

Help me make my flash life better. (Questions about the Flash CS3 user interface.)

I am running Flash CS3 on Vista. There are certain aspects to the user interface which grate and I'd like to know if anyone knows ways to fix them:

1. What is with the two color-picker palettes? Sometimes I get one and sometimes I get the other, and there's no rhyme or reason to it. There's no correlation to what I'm doing: the exact same operation sometimes shows one and sometimes shows the other. I like one better than the other; how do I make it so that it's the one I always get?

2. When I use the shaping tool on objects, Flash takes it upon itself to add lots of control points which I don't want and which aren't really needed, and which get in my way. This also happens sometimes when I'm adjusting an object by using the spline tools on existing control points. The shape is just fine, but I deselect it, reselect it again, and suddenly there's a swarm of new control points. How do I make Flash stop doing that?

3. Is it possible for me to choose the rotating set of colors it uses for the layers? There are at least three of them which are utterly useless which I always have to change when they come up.

4. Sometimes selected areas get highlighted and sometimes they don't. How do I control that to make it always happen?

5. The only way I've found to delete multiple layers without doing each one independently is to highlight one layer, delete it, then highlight all the others and hit Control-Y. That seems unreasonably indirect. Is there a natural way (e.g. a hot key combination or a menu choice) to delete two or more layers simultaneously without going through that nonsense?

posted by Chocolate Pickle to computers & internet (3 comments total)

1. One is the fill color and one is the line color. So shapes and text will be colored the fill color, but lines and any borders around shapes will be the line color. In CS4 the top one is the line color and the bottom one is the fill color. *doesn't think that's changed between cs3 and 4*

2. I can't help with this one, I don't do this too much.

3. I don't believe so.

4. Depends on how you're trying to select items. If you're clicking and draging over shapes or broken up text, it will only select the parts you highlighted. To select an entire shape, double click it (this will also grab any border you have). It will select the whole thing if the object is a symbol.

5. Select all layers you want to delete in the timeline, and right click delete/hit the trash icon. At least that's how it works in cs4. Again, not something I think they changed between versions.
posted by royalsong at 3:35 PM on October 15, 2009

1. I just opened Flash and clicked the line fill box, and then the area fill box, and got the same version of the picker popup for both. But at other times I've gotten the other popup, for either of them.

4. I understand how to select objects. What I want to know is why sometimes when a complete object (or area) is selected, it is highlighted, and sometimes when a complete object (or area) is selected, it is not highlighted.

5. I've never noticed the trashcan icon. That did it! Thank you!
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 4:47 PM on October 15, 2009

1. I misunderstood your question. In general, there are three color palettes. The main one, which has black to white shades and primary colors on the left, and a whole slew of other colors on the right, organized mostly by saturation. All these are "websafe" colors. You can get a more standard windows color picker (and be able to pick from non websafe colors) from clicking a little box in right corner of the first color picker. The other is the color panel, which kinda sorta behaves like the first picker, but gives you more options.

4. Sounds more like a memory issue or zoomed issue. Unless you mean the blue or checkered box that appears around some objects but others have just a ton of tiny little dots when you highlight it. That again is symbol/bitmap vs shape created in flash. Symbols get the box where shapes get the tiny dots.
posted by royalsong at 8:54 AM on October 16, 2009