Back to Basics

This two week period has caused me to revert to a mindset similar to that in a former time when I was first learning a lot of new programs and doing a lot of learning by doing.

I am in a place that perhaps many of my students and clients (teachers such as yourselves that are learning a lot of new stuff for the first time)It is not a bad place to be, but out of ones comfort zone it is well... uncomfortable. I dont know what I dont know about flash and feel a need to go back to where I was comfortable...

To elaborate, last post I talked about how much I got from the tutorials at Flash in Flash and how much I had learned. Well this week I went back to the Flash in A Flash an found in the next episode I could really not keep up with what he was doing and there were again a lot of holes in my knowledge that are preventing me from being able to be even a little bit productive in Flash.

Long story short, I have gone back to Atomic Learning and have re-done a lot of their basic tool techniques again. The stuff I did with the crowns and objects in a lot of respects had jumped me to this week in my objectives (from the plan I started with) and had left out a bunch of basic tools that I really need to re-visit. The selection tools and the pens and paths that I did last week make more sense after looking at the Atomic Learning videos again.

I have an object that I have been working on which is going to be a button but I would like it to have an outside rounded rectangle that helps to define it on the page.

The button looks like this


So far so good but it needs the rounded rectangle.

I had imported the file from photoshop and it had 3 layers in the timeline.
I added a fourth layer and then changed to the rectangle primitive tool.
With the corner radius set to 16px and the color selected as a pale blue I drew a rectangle around the edge of the button.
The file looks like this now in Flash.

Choosing File >> Export >> Export Image.... I was able to export the file as a .png file.


Well that worked sort of... the bottom and side appear to be missing.
I will try and increase the size of the canvas and see if that helps.

Increasing the canvas to 55 pixels and moving the rectangle down has fixed the problem.
Canvas size is modified in the Modify >> Document dialog.

So the button now has a border around it. Next week I am going to look at how to do some basic animation and perhaps I can make the new in the button glow or pulse or something cool.