First Draft Problems

In regards to my project, I have been working on the larger problems for the past few days. The problems I had were the following:

1. Misaligned text
2. Text buttons where the actual text was not clickable
3. Resizing the screen

Problems 1 and 2 were simple to fix once I determined the problem was Flash's default setting for text was dynamic, while most of my text is static (including the button text). This seems counter-intuitive to me, since it seems like most text tends to be static anyway, but maybe that is just my non-computer-savvyness speaking up.

The problems having text being "dynamic" when I actually wanted it to be "static' involved being unable to properly bold/italicize/resize different words within the same text block and being unable to turn the physical text into a button. So, after going through and relabeling all of my text as static, my buttons function properly, and my text is no longer misaligned.

Another problem that resulted from my non-savvyness was I assumed, that like a Word document, I could "select all" just resize my entire Flash document after I was finished creating it. This is not true. As a consequence, I have spent most of Thanksgiving Break resizing all of my buttons, images, etc individually. It's been super fun.

Now that I have finished this, I am starting to work on improving my animations. My largest criticism of Flash Professional 8 Revealed is each chapter is almost always completely separate from all other chapters. In effect, I have had some difficulty understanding how the different lessons I have learned can work together to create a coherent tutorial/website. What I would have preferred is to have built upon each chapter/the work done in each lesson so that at the end of the book I would have had a complete tutorial rather than a bunch of individual lessons that are not always easy to relate and apply to one another. But again, this complaint may just result from my general lack of experience in creating websites.