About the Project panel

The Project panel in Flash CS4 Professional is a great way to visualize your Flash projects and to move quickly between files and folders as you work (see Figure 2). By using the Project panel and following best practices for asset organization, you'll be able to quickly launch and maintain projects—saving production time and making it easier to deliver the final product.

Figure 2. The Project panel contains the following interface items: Project menu (a), Options menu (b), Refresh file tree (c), Pin (d), New folder (e), New file (f), Create class (g), and Delete (h)

Note: The Project panel shown in Figure 2 is the updated version available from Grant Skinner's website.

A brief history of the Project panel

I started using the Project panel back in Macromedia Flash 8 as a way to visualize the file structure of my ActionScript classes and related assets. Originally the Project panel was designed so that you could add files and folders one by one to create a representation of a project, which it saved in an XML file with the FLP (Flash Project) extension. This feature worked fairly well if you were in the process of creating files for a project, but it became frustrating to enter each item individually when you wanted to work with an existing project that contained a lot of files.

Flash CS4 Professional introduces a completely new Project panel based on Grant Skinner's gProject panel extension. The Flash CS4 Project panel creates a project by rendering the files and folders in a specified "project folder" to the Project panel view. This approach facilitates faster and easier workflows while converting existing projects into Flash projects available in the Projects panel. The Flash CS4 Project panel can also add files and folders one by one, and provides many additional features not available in the previous version of the panel.

Key features

The Flash CS4 Project panel contains most of the functionality of the previous version of the Project panel, except that the features are now related to the physical directory structure and file structure of your project. The new Project panel is actually a Window SWF extension that uses JSFL (Flash JavaScript) to manipulate the Flash authortime environment and the local file system containing the project.

In addition to creating and managing files and folders as you would expect, the Project panel also offers a number of advanced features geared toward more complex projects. The following features are new to Flash CS4:

• Filtering the project view using the "pin" folder feature
• Creating ActionScript classes using predefined ActionScript templates
• Automatically binding a class to a selected symbol or creating a new bound symbol while the class is created
• Aggregating external ActionScript classes and SWC libraries
• Binding with external shared libraries
• Creating Flash projects for use with Adobe Flex class files

There are many workflows possible with the Project panel. Be sure not to miss out on the more subtle features (see the Project panel tips and tricks section).

Get the latest Project panel from Grant Skinner

Grant posted an update to the Project panel with new features that, at the time of this writing, are not available in Flash CS4. Here is a partial list of the updated features:

• The panel is now skinned to match the CS4 interface (based on the Library panel)
• The actions menu has been tightened up
• A new utilities submenu has been added, allowing you to add your own utilities
• You can now access Panel Preferences > Settings to specify whether to open files in Flash or via the OS on a per file type basis
• A new option in Panel Preferences > Settings allows you to import assets to the Stage or the Library
• The dialog boxes are now smaller and they scroll to reduce the minimum panel size
• More file type icons have been added
• A new API allowing you to script the panel with JSFL offers some new possibilities (see the Project panel tips and tricks section)
• Minor UI tweaks
• Visit Grant's site to download the latest Project panel version: Free Update to Flash CS4 Project Panel.
• If you haven't already done so, you should also download the latest update to Flash CS4 Professional and Adobe Flash Player 10 from the Adobe Flash Support Center.

Read the documentation

The tutorial in the next section walks you through the common tasks related to working with the Project panel. Before you get started, take a look at the Working with projects section of the Using Flash CS4 Professional online documentation for an overview.

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