Deconstructing the Paint Application I: Setup, Skins, Canvas Color, Help File

From Adrien-Luc Sanders, former About.com Guide

We’re going to start off with the basics of setting up the application’s layout and a few other simple things; this is a fairly simple lesson, and if you’ve already got your design and navigation functionality worked out, you can probably skip it. However, it’s also going to zip past fairly quickly, so for those of you following along at a beginner level, I’ll try to link to relevant material when it’s needed. We've covered a great deal of this, but mostly in examples; this is the first time we're going to tackle a serious, multi-leveled project with more practical uses.

The first thing you’ll need to do is set up your skins and your canvas. I made my skins in Photoshop, exported them as transparent GIFs with the canvas area left clear/blank, and then imported them into Flash before converting them to symbols (F8). You could also design your skins in Flash, but the important thing is that they must all be symbols with distinct identifying instance names, and it helps to arrange them all on top of each other on a single layer, with the default skin on top of the others.

Your canvas should be a blank white area, converted to a movie clip and placed on a layer underneath your skins layer. Assign an instance name to this, as well.

Previous

• Starting Off
• Adding the layout
• Skins buttons
• Skins code
• Setting base values in scripts on the first frame
• The Canvas Color button
• Showing and hiding the help files
• Arranging the contents of the help files

Next