Flash Out of the Box

Chapter A. Workflow and Workspace Tips

Now that you’ve worked with Flash for a while, you may have noticed that it has a tendency to take over your desktop with panels and dialog boxes, and not everything functions quite the way you might prefer.

You’re still here? Oh. Well then I guess I’ll keep talking.

Here are some tips that can improve your workflow while using Flash. I hope this appendix answers some of the questions that may be lingering in your head.

Preferences

Just like every program out there, Flash has a Preferences dialog box. Flash’s Preferences dialog box has five tabs, and each tab has several sections. The following subsections suggest ways you can improve or enhance the performance and functionality of Flash by adjusting the preferences under each tab. I won’t tell you about every tab and every option in Preferences, just the ones I think will help you (I’ve excluded the Clipboard and Warnings tabs because they’re just not very exciting).

To follow along, open the Preferences dialog box by choosing Edit → Preferences on Windows, or Flash (Professional) → Preferences on Mac.

The General Tab

The General tab, shown in Figure A-1, contains miscellaneous preferences that don’t seem to belong anywhere else. Here, I highlight some preferences of particular interest.

Undo Levels

When you first install Flash, the number of undo levels is set to 1000 (although it defaults to 100 in the 7.2 update). But the undo stack requires memory that your computer may not have to spare. Everything ...