| The new Find and Replace feature enables you to search your document. The History panel allows you to search backwards in time for previous actions. The Find and Replace Feature You can use the new Find and Replace feature (Edit, Find and Replace) to find and replace a text string, a font, a color , a symbol, a sound file, a video file, or an imported bitmap file in your Flash document. It's powerful, and it's easy to use because it's like find and replace features in common applications such as Microsoft Word. The History Panel The History panel shows a list of the things you've done since creating or opening the current document. Whether you draw an object, place a component on the Stage, set a component property, or select a frame, every move you make that affects the document is recorded in the History panel. You can use a simple slider to go backward any the number of steps, up to a specified maximum (100 by default), and then come forward again. It's like having a rewind and fast forward button for your document. Used in this fashion, the History panel provides a much more convenient way to undo (Edit, Undo) and redo (Edit, Redo) large numbers of steps. NOTE In previous versions of Flash, there was a separate set of undo steps for different interface areas, such as the Stage, movie clips, and Library. In Flash MX 2004, there is just one undo stack for the whole document. Some designers see this as a significant loss, and say that the History panel is not really a substitute.
There are also more complex ways to use it, such as saving a series of steps as a command, so that you can repeat them any time you want. You can also copy steps from one segment of the slider "timeline" and replay them at another point. Such uses are complicated by three factors. First, some actions ( marked with a red x on the History panel) can't be copied , replayed, or saved. For instance, the History panel shows you that you selected a frame, or that you set a property of a component, but it can't copy, replay, or save those actions. So those actions get skipped on copies, replays, and saves (though not on undos and redos that use the slider). These missing parts can cause the whole sequence of actions to have a different result. Second, you can't reorder items on the History panel. These two limitations make it much more difficult to create useful commands. Finally, any time you go back and change something in the "past," everything after that point is wiped out. So you can't go back and correct one mistake but preserve everything that came after it, for example. These limitations can be overcome to some extent, but only if you're willing to tackle JavaScript programming for the Flash environment, as discussed in the next section. |
