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Flash CS3: The Missing Manual
book

Flash CS3: The Missing Manual

by E. A. Vander Veer, Chris Grover
May 2007
Beginner content levelBeginner
530 pages
16h 16m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Flash CS3: The Missing Manual

Customizing Components

After you've dragged a component to the Stage, you can begin customizing it. For example, if you add a CheckBox component to the Stage, you want to change the standard CheckBox label to a specific label that fits your needs. If you add a Button component to the Stage, in addition to changing the button's label (from Button to Submit Form, say), you want to tell Flash what to do when someone clicks the button.

You can't customize a component using Flash's editing tools the way you modify a symbol or an image. Instead, Flash gives you four separate panels to customize a component: the Properties and Parameters panels, the Component Inspector, and the Actions panel. How many (and which) panels you need to use depends both on the component you're customizing and on which characteristics of the component you want to change. For example, you can customize the labels of the MenuBar component using the Parameters panel, but to customize the labels of the Menu component, you need to create ActionScript actions, which you do in the Actions panel.

Note

Components are sometimes referred to as black boxes because you can't inspect their inner workings. The only things you can look at or change are the characteristics that the developer exposes (lets you access) through the Property Inspector, the Component Inspector, or ActionScript classes.

Customizing Components Using the Properties and Parameters Panels

After you drag a component to the Stage, Flash displays the component's ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596510442Supplemental ContentErrata Page