Avoiding common authoring mistakes in Flash Professional

This series of articles outlines common authoring mistakes that can cause issues in your Adobe Flash Professional projects, and offers techniques you can apply to prevent them from occurring. These guidelines also show you ways to work more efficiently and so you'll encounter fewer performance problems and runtime errors.

As you read through these recommendations, find the tips that are applicable to your projects and experiment with changing your development habits. By becoming more aware of potential pitfalls, you can avoid complications and adhere to best practices when developing your own animations and applications.

If you are new to Flash Professional, you'll learn strategies and conventions that make the development process easier as you take on more complex projects. If you are an experienced Flash developer, you'll find tips to make your projects easier to maintain and update when collaborating with other developers.

One necessary skill when working with Flash Professional, among other software, is the ability to precisely click the desired object or interface item in the authoring environment:

• Flash is contextual. The options that are presented in the Property inspector and dialog boxes are specific to the object you've currently selected. If you change the focus (for example, by selecting the entire Stage or a different object) you can inadvertently make mistakes because you are setting properties or changing attributes of a different object. Accurate object selection is therefore critical.
• Timeline requires precision clicking. Because the frames are so close together, it is easy to select the wrong keyframe or frame accidentally. As you are just getting started, take your time to make sure that you've set the focus on the object or the frame in the Timeline that you want to edit before making changes.
• Undo is your friend. If you select the wrong item accidentally and make an unwanted change, you can choose Edit > Undo repeatedly to back out of recently introduced issues and revert the project back to the way it was when the FLA file was last working correctly.

After you read through this series of articles, or a portion thereof, I hope they will have introduced (or reminded you) of some helpful tips you can use to avoid common issues that occur when you author projects in Flash.

To improve your Flash Professional knowledge and skills, check out the following resources:

• Optimizing performance for the Flash Platform (online documentation)
• Flash Professional glossary
• Tips for using Flash efficiently
• Five steps to learning Flash Professional