We created some objects, we added them to the stage.
I'm just going to delete them quickly and add a new object
onto the stage, not that I really have to,
just for fun.
Click on "v",
I just have to make sure that I'm back in my arrow mode.
Now, the next thing I want to do is talk about
the properties panel and we said before,
there's a lot of ways to get to your properties
panel.
Most likely if you can't find it on your stage, you
would just go to window, search for properties
and open it up.
But I know where my properties is because I set
it up to be minimized here on the side.
So i'm just going to click on it, and clicking
on my properties will reveal to me my properties.
Basically, what the properties are, and
the most
easy way to explain it is that, the properties
panel is kind of a dynamic panel and that's
a reason why I really needed to have something on
the stage.
What does that mean?
The properties panel... and let me just for this
example...
I'm just going to see if my workspace then again,
I'm going to override my stuff because I want to make sure that we get
back to be exactly this way,
because I'm going to change my panel, I'm going to grab properties
and
throw it outside of that because I don't want it to toggle
on and off every second right now,
even though usually I do.
So now I have my properties panel out.  Let's see what
happens when you select something that's on the stage.
As soon as I click on something on the stage,
for one, you'll see that it's selected, it'll
have like this mesh
on it showing me that it's selected.
Now that it's selected, our properties panel
changed.
It's true with anything in Flash.
If I had other visual items on the stage, you'll
see that every time I have a visual item on
the stage again I'm going to click on "V",
If I select it, you'll see that we have a shape
and it gives us details about the shape, which we could
then modify if we wanted to, and change around.
We could go to our
object, we could change it's color. This is
kind of an overview that says, okay: what
is my properties?  My properties gives me information
about my currently selected
element, whatever that element is.
If I select nothing,
in other words i'm selecting the stage.
When I select the stage then Flash will generate the
properties panel from
a thing that's called...
well, it's kind of a mixture between our publish
settings
and our document settings.
Before we dig into them, let me
just highlight our most important thing that
really is our focus, which is our
document class, which is right here.
That's exactly what we're gonna work with
to actually configure our application to work
with an external class.
But, until we get to that point where we
are in the decision path,
of loading an external asset and working
with an external asset,
let's just see an overview of some of the
properties that are related globally to our application.
As we said previously when we were talking
about the timeline, is that Flash
re-renders the application and the visual
things in the application
in a certain frame rate and
currently we're set to 24 frames a second.
which we could change
and we can change them in our frame rate as
well.
It doesn't really matter what you see in
your properties because really depending on
your flash version you're going to see different
things.
Basically, when you have nothing selected, your
in your editing mode, enabling you to edit
things that are related to your publishing,
and things that are related to properties that
are
global to your application.  If you can't get to
them through your properties, we are going to see how
to get to them in a second.  So I'm not going to make
any edits here.
We're going to see how we can edit
directly from our properties panel,
and how we edit from our publish settings as
well.
So in our publish settings, we could see that we're
running Flash 10, but we could have ran
Flash 9 as well.
We're running in ActionScript 3.0,
which is exactly the version of Flash we
want to run,
and you could see that we can't really tinker that
from our publish settings, it's just giving us that
information, and here we would put our class path.
Now in our properties we said we could
see our frame rates, which we could change manually
right here, or go into our properties panel,
well overlay you probably would call it.
We could change the size of our application
which we can't manually do it right here, we could
go into our properties
overlay as well.
Or, we can change our background color if we wanted
to and change the background color.
Now, an interesting new addition I guess,
I haven't seen it before, is the swf history
which I don't believe existed in previous versions.
It's just here to show you that
Flash evolves and changes and
it really isn't
critical for our mission, but it's
really great to know the properties panel
and seeing all these different things
that are related to items, and it's the best way
to explore and find things
that are out of our properties.
Now before we wrap our discussion about
properties, let's touch back into our properties
which is a very big
portion of our properties,
how do we edit our properties?
We could click obviously on the edit button
right here to get into our document properties,
but if we don't know how to get here, or we couldn't find
it we were working in a different version of Flash,
again we could always go through our menus.
In our menu, this time around would be
in modify>document,
which modify>document would open up our documents
settings.
So we could either go through modify>document,
or we could just click on our edit button
and that would enable us
to change the dimensions of our applications.
Or, let's say
we would want to change it to be a hundred
and the height we would want to remain the same and
if we click ok, we're going to see that our application
size has now changed.
So one thing is if we look at our application
we don't really see our application,
we can't really see our bounding anymore.
Why is that??... delete
Because if I
just close the properties for a second,
let's search for a...
where is our...
kinda disappeared didn't it...
let me try here maybe,
let's get to a really small view,
it's twenty five percent
I still can't see it...
so let's see what's going on here.  Let's go
into our library,
not library, sorry, let's go back into our properties,
which this is great because I am kind of lost right now,
and we'll see that our stage, here we go,
our stage background-color is held as the name
of the color of our
non stage, so we can't even see our stage.
Let's set it back to being white so you could
actually see it.
Excellent, so now we could see that we actually
did grow smaller, so let me just
go back to our 100% view
and put our content again in our view.
Very good,
just a little bit more,
just a little bit less, okay.
Let's go back into our edit.
In our edit
we probably want to go back to 550.
Now I would recommend, never really change
your ruler unit.  We're working in
an application and it's going to be served
on an application, and applications don't really
work on any other measurement besides
pixels.
It's here really just for print, I think,
well to be honest, I never really changed it,
and I would love to hear
why would anyone change it.  You could also
see that right now
we're set to 550 pixels but
we could have set it
to not work with pixels, but why would we
set it to work with anything but pixels,
When we're working inside of a program?
Pixels, by the way, are basically...
their size really depends on the browser,
well it really depends on the resolution
you're in, and it really depends on
the computer you're in,
and that's a great way to work because when
you're working on an application, there's no such thing as
an application that's ten inches
or an application that's five inches, because it really
just depends on your monitor, how big
it is, an what your resolution is, and so
on.
So it's really not relevant, and in the
world of programming where
you know your resolution is a certain amount
of pixels,
it makes it much easier to work because then you
know you're working in the same type of system,
which is pixels, which is basically all
the world of web, and applications really really
works with pixels.  So that's all really I have
to say right now about pixels, and when we go on
deeper into working with visual items, we'll
revisit this concept, but
let's just keep it working with pixels.
We could change our frame rate, but for our sake,
our samples, it really doesn't matter, we
wouldn't want to change it because 24
is good for us.
We could change our background, which you
don't really need to, but we could if we wanted to.
We could set our default to be whatever
changes we make
so we could just set it
and change our default to be whatever we
want it to be, so if we want our background
to be a different color,
we could set that to be the default.  But we're
good with the default settings that Flash has.