Organizing and structuring your Flash projects (part 1)

You have just got an amazing idea for a new exciting flash game and you start coding and designing frantically. Suddenly you stop and you remember that you had to stop working on your last project because you could not understand your code anymore; worse, you could not locate most of it at all. Without even mentioning the fact that you had erased some precious graphics by mistake because of the random naming convention you always apply to your library assets. Right, time for a change...a new Flash developer is about to be born.

Organizing your workspace

Panels

Are you happy with the layout of your workspace ? Why are you leaving those panels that you never use? Maybe it's time to move them or even to get rid of them.
- you can drag the panel by its gripper (on the left side of the title bar).
- to add a panel to an existing panel group drag the panel by its gripper onto another panel. A black line appears next to the target panel to show where the panel will be placed.
- to float a panel drag the panel by its gripper and move it away from other panels.
- to close a panel, do one of the following: Select the desired panel from the Window menu. Right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Macintosh) the panel's title bar and select Close Panel Group from the context menu.

In Adobe Flash, you can organize panels into groups (fig1). You can rearrange the order in which panels appear within panel groups. You can also create new panel groups and dock panels to existing panel groups. If you want a panel to appear on its own, separated from other panel groups, you can float the panel. This is particularly useful for panels that you want access to all the time, for example, the Help panel or the Actions panel.

fig1

Once you are happy with the layout of your panels go to Window > Workspace Layout > Save Current. Enter a name for the layout and click OK.

Timeline

It is worth mentioning that you can change the size of frames in the Timeline (fig2), and add color to sequences of frames to highlight them. You can also include thumbnail previews of frame content in the Timeline (fig3). These thumbnails are useful as an overview of the animation, but they require extra screen space.

fig2


fig3