Workspace

<p></p> <p>Today, we will discuss the foundation of the Flash workspace, take a peek at different styles, and learn how to customize your own <a href="http://02geek.com/courses/video/6/44/Workspace.html">Flash layout</a> so that it works best for you and of course looks the way you want! This is the fun part of workspaces. Give your new one a chance: save your custom layout and jump back into the action! Before we begin coding it is important to get a basic understanding of the Flash workspace. Learn all about the panels and study which shortcuts will make coding easier and faster for you.</p> <h1>Working in Flash: Cs5 workspace</h1> <p>You can change your workspace to your favorite layout. You want your panels in a different place? Drag them there. Don't want a particular panel (or panels cluttering up your workspace?) Close it/them. Everything is very fluid, so tinker with them and move things wherever you'd like. If you want to add panels, go to the window tab, and click on the panel of your choice. You can save your new layout, and it will not affect your actual file in any way. Set up several different ones to try out - have fun!</p> <h2>Our workspace video transcript</h2> <div class="expandable"><pre> So in this video we're going to essentially dig into our workspace. By default, the workspace in both CS4 and CS5 is the essentials workspace. While in CS3 the layout is probably more similar to something that was coined in CS4 to be called classic. If you're in CS3 right now then you don't really have this panel, and what you have is your window>workspace, which you don't even have access to before you create a new file. So, because of that we're going to first create a new file, also because it just makes sense because almost everything here is disabled and greyed out until we actually have a working file. We don't have access to many different libraries, or panels, that are available as soon as you have your flash file opened. When I'm saying my Flash file, I'm referring to an FLA, in our case an AS 3.0 FLA. So I'm going to click on a new FLA, a new Flash file, an ActionScript 3.0 file. (It doesn't really matter if you're in CS3, 4, or 5, just open up your file.) Now that we have our file open let us talk about the layout. Personally I'm just used to working in CS3 and I kind of ported the same kind of methodology: I just liked the way I worked in CS3. Nothing bad about the new essentials view in CS4 or CS5, I was just comfortable with it and what's brilliant about adobe, is they didn't take away my control of setting it up the way I like to set it up. And the way we could do that is just by clicking on our essentials menu or going through our window, workspace, and selecting the classic view. By selecting the classic view we're going to be in a mode that's more similar to the older way where your timeline was on the top, and your content was in the centerfold, and your tools for designing and illustrating, and so on, would be on your left hand, and all the other panels would be minimized on your right side. With that said, let's revisit the essentials for a second just for the sake of playing around with the layouts. You don't really have to keep the layout the way it is. Even if you like essentials or you like any one of the other layouts, you could just check them and see which makes more sense to you. If you like this layout, or you're never going to work with the motion editor, why not get rid of it? So just drag it out, close it. Maybe you want your timeline on the top or minimized. If you want it on top, grab it, put it on top. If you want it minimized, double click on it. Double click to open it. You want to give it less space, give it less space. It's really about tinkering with it. Everything here is very fluid which is really brilliant. So you could grab your library as well. Let's say we want our library to be on the side here, so we stick it here. Now obviously this is starting to look really ugly, but I hope the point is here that you can play around with this as much as you want. In CS3, by default, our properties panel will be down here, and chances are you won't really move it around, but obviously you are more then welcome to move anything anywhere you want. It's up to you really, it's just about where you're comfortable and how you like things to be set up. Well I'm not going to save this because it's a really bad layout. But if we like this layout and we're comfortable with it, we could go into our window again, into our workspace, and create a new workspace. By clicking on "new workspace,", it's going to prompt and ask me to give it a name, and then it will enable me to save this layout, which I didn't save because I don't even like it, so I'll click on cancel. Now I could, on the other hand, create a layout that I do like. A layout that I do like is "Ben,", which I preserved a little earlier, which is kind of similar to the classic view where my timeline is on the top. The big difference, which is not that big, is that my properties panel is right here. For me, I like that my output is right here, my compiling errors are right here, so as we're running the application, for me that's the most organized view. Obviously when you're watching the videos, if things don't look exactly the same, they don't have to look exactly the same as long as you could find the different output windows at the different panels that are important, and we're going to touch on all those panels in this intro video. Next thing I wanted to talk about is, let's see how you could create your own "Ben" panel, or your own panel, if you want to work in a panel or something similar. So I'm going to pick "classic" because it is close to what I like. What I'm missing here is my properties. I'm actually not missing my properties, my properties are there. Let me reset classic. Here we go, so this is how classic looks like by default. I already tinkered with it earlier so that's the reason why it looked different. So what I've done is dragged out my properties, and just added it into the top. Now it's on the top of my list, and I got my properties, and I could probably make it a little bit bigger so it's easier to see all the content inside, as we click into it and click it out of that. That way it keeps my main center area cleaner. Now I'm missing a few panels here. I'm missing my trace, so I'm going to go to window, and I'm going to look for trace-where is trace- we want compiling errors output as well, so output is our trace, sorry. It's called "output" but we trace into it, and you'll see what I mean in later videos. In this course we're going to see what that means. So we have our output panel, and I just want to add in as well, my compiler errors, when no one is perfect, this is exactly where I want it, and this is the layout I like having. Now I could save it but I already saved it before so I don't need to save it. OK, so I could just reset it back to "classic" (the way the classic is supposed to be,) go into my Ben view and we are in my Ben view. And that's all we really need to do to be in the same similar layout as I'm working on. And that's basically all we really need to know about working with workspace. Just find the workspace that you're comfortable with; it doesn't affect anything else, it's not saved into the file itself, it's actually saved into your configurations of your editor, and it's really unique for you, so you can do anything you want, it doesn't effect anything but your computer, and it doesn't affect the files that you're saving. </pre> </div>