New Drawing Tools

There are two new drawing tools; the Pen tool and Shape Primitives tools. For those of you familiar with the drawing tools in Adobe Illustrator^R, you will be glad to hear that the Flash drawing engine has been rebuilt and the new Pen tool in Flash works as in Illustrator with the same Bezier controls and keyboard shortcuts. As a result, you can drag and drop Illustrator graphics directly into Flash. The Shape Primitives tools allow you to draw dynamic shapes. For example, with this new tool you can round the corners of a rectangle on the Stage by visually dragging the corners. For more precise adjustments, you can use the slider in the Property Inspector. Also, by clicking the Lock icon in the Property Inspector, you can work with one corner without affecting the others.

ActionScript 3

With this new release, ActionScript 3 has come of age and Flash can now convert your Timeline Tween animations to ActionScript 3 with the click of your mouse. What a great way to learn to code ActionScript. Just create an animation on the Timeline and then use Flash to write the code which you can then study. Not only is this a good learning tool but it also gives you editable and reusable ActionScript. For those of you who are ActionScript programmers, you will appreciate the ActionScript Debugger which is the same one used for Adobe Flex^TM Builder^TM 2. The Debugger makes finding the errors within your code so easy. First, test your movie and when the pop-up window displays any errors, click on the error message and Flash will take you directly to the line of code that caused the error. You no longer need to search through lines of code to find the elusive mistake. Writing code in the Actions Panel is much easier also with Script Assist updated for ActionScript 3 and a few goodies borrowed from Dreamweaver^R. You can collapse/expand sections of your code, autoformat and add comments with the click of an icon in the Actions Panel.

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