| Q1: | I accidentally dragged a movie clip to the Stage and used the Properties panel to change it to Button behavior. Now my movie clip doesn't play, and it kind of works like a button. (There's an over state, and a hand cursor appears when the user moves his mouse over the button.) What's up with that? |
| A1: | Remember that the fact that the master version of a symbol is a movie clip (or any other symbol behavior) doesn't prevent you from changing the behavior of individual instances on the Stage. If you change an instance that has the Movie Clip behavior to Button behavior, the first frame of the movie clip acts as the up state, the second frame is the over state, the third is the down state, and the fourth is the hit state. You won't see the labels in the master version of a symbol unless the default property of that symbol was Button in the first place (or if you change the properties of the master symbol by way of the Library's Options menu). (There's more information about this in Hour 4, "Using the Library for Productivity.") |
| Q2: | My buttons aren't working when I click Play. Why? |
| A2: | If you haven't learned it already, forget about using Play to really see what the user will see. Use Control, Test Movie. Alternatively, you can turn on Enable Simple Buttons in the Control menu; however, this is a pain because you must turn that option off before you can click to edit a button instance. (With the option on, the button will act like a button, not like an instance on which you can click.) Finally, the feature refers to "simple" buttons, meaning that more complex ones won't work. So you should just use Test Movie. |
| Q3: | I noticed in my Components panel there are already a few buttons available, why are we bothering making them from scratch? |
| A3: | Those components are very useful and, in fact, you'll learn how to use them in Hour 17, "Using Components." They're very consistent but can tend to look almost too commonplace. You can customize them, but that almost always takes more work than just making a custom button. Both types of buttons (components and the homemade type you made this hour) have value. |
| Q4: | I swear I followed the directions, but some of these exercises are just not working. What's a likely cause? |
| A4: | The biggest oversight I've seen is accidentally putting buttons inside buttons which won't work. When you're trying to be efficient by using symbols inside the different states of a button, make sure you're selecting the Movie Clip behavior. |
| Q5: | The invisible button isn't quite "invisible" because the user's cursor changes. What can I do if I want to really hide a button? |
| A5: | There's a property that, provided you write a script, will turn off the hand cursor for a button. You'll learn more about ActionScript in the next hour, but for now let me show you how to turn off the hand cursor for a single button: Give the button instance an instance name via the Properties panel. Say, "myButton." Put this script in the first keyframe where the button appears: myButton.useHandCursor=false; To turn off the cursor on all buttons put this script in the first keyframe of your movie: Button.prototype.useHandCursor=false;
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