Creating Fireworks Panels – Part 2: Advanced Custom Panel Development

The Annotations Panel

The Annotations panel is a custom panel in Fireworks that allows you to leave notes or annotations in a Fireworks document, either for the document itself or for individual elements within that document (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Annotations panel in action

The current user's name appears at the top of the panel. This identifies who edits or creates the annotations. (Basically, this means you.) Next to the user name is a button that allows you to change the annotation. Below that is the main annotation text area. This is where you create, edit, and view annotations for your document and those elements within it. The Save button saves the current annotation to the current selection.

Each element in a Fireworks document—path, bitmap, or even a slice—can have its own annotations, and they appear in this panel just by selecting the element. If no elements are selected, the annotations displayed will represent those for the entire Fireworks document. The status bar indicates who last edited the current annotation and when.

The Annotations panel template FLA (see Figure 2) is provided in the source files you downloaded at the beginning of this tutorial.

Figure 2. Annotations panel template FLA

You can find it here in the sample download:

Source Files/Templates/Annotations.fla			

Open it in Flash, publish the SWF to the Fireworks Command Panels folder, and then restart Fireworks to make sure Fireworks recognizes Annotations as a panel.

Note: The Annotations panel I discuss here is not compatible with my original Annotations panel. If you have been using the original panel, use the Convert Annotations command provided with the source files to convert older annotations in a Fireworks document into the format that's compatible with this newer panel.

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