That s Some Fine Movement

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That's Some Fine Movement

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Normally when you zoom in or out, the number of pixels a selected object will move when you nudge it with arrow keys changes based on the zoom factor. If you'd like to make sure that your objects move only 1 pixel at a time, regardless of the magnification of your view, you can enable Snap to Pixels by going under View, then Snapping and choosing Snap to Pixels. Another cool thing is that when you're zoomed to 400% or more, you'll see a nifty pixel grid to which all objects will be constrained. To temporarily disable or enable (depends on current state) the pixel grid and pixel snapping, press the X key. When you release it, the grid and snapping will return to the set state.

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Symbolic Jumping

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If you have many symbols in many directories of your Library, finding the right one to edit can be a bit time-consuming . Try this really quick way to find and edit a symbol in your Library. Look to the top right of the Stage window where you'll see an icon with shapes on it that is just to the left of the View Magnification drop-down. Clicking this Edit Symbols icon will give you a drop-down menu of every folder and symbol in your Library. Clicking on any one will take you to its time-line for editing. It's much faster than hunting through the tree structure of the Library. The only drawback is that this only works for symbols, not bitmaps, fonts, and other things that may also be in a Library. Incidentally, the icon just to the left of the Edit Symbols will do the same for scenes in your document. Things couldn't be much faster than that.

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The Nudge Factor

Any time you select an object on the Stage in Flash and move it around using your arrow keys, you'll move the item a varying number of pixels based on your view scale. Here's how it works. If you are at 100%, a simple arrow key nudge will move the item 1 pixel in that direction. Holding down the SHIFT key while nudging will move it 10 times as far (10 pixels). If you set your view scale to 50%, a nudge will move it 2 pixels and a SHIFT nudge will be 20 pixels. The opposite is true when your view scale is set to 200%. You can use this information to figure out how far Flash will move your selected objects. But as you can see, if you set your view to some arbitrary number like 34%, you'll have a much harder time determining the nudge factor.

Here's a formula you can use to figure out those complex ones. For regular nudge, use 1/(Zoom Percentage/100). For SHIFT nudge, use 10/(Zoom Percentage/100).

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Multiple Select in the Library

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If you have determined that several items in your Library that are currently scattered all over need to be put in a folder or deleted from the Library, there's an easy way. At first you might approach the issue by picking each one and pressing the trash can at the bottom right of the Library to remove it. Well, repeating these two steps over and over for each item could take forever.

Instead, select all the items at once by holding down the CTRL key (CMD on Mac) as you select each item. Once you have them all selected, you can either drag them wherever you want, or, to remove them, just click the trash can once. The same concept works items in the Stage and Timeline, but you must use SHIFT instead of CTRL. Think of it as one of the little games Flash plays with our minds.

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That s Some Fine Movement