Chapter 13
Note that Library assets can now be organized into folders.
Careful with that Delete button: when you delete from the Library, the action is not un-doable.
If you change an item's behavior, say, from Movie Clip to Button, all future instances of the item will reflect the change. However, current instances will not. If you want to change these instances, you must cut them from the timeline and replace them with the modified asset.
Working with folders: don't worry if this technique seems of dubious value for Internet projects. Content for the Net usually comes in small packages, meaning that you probably won't have four or five QuickTime movies or eight different sounds--the sort of profusion that calls for folders. You might find folders more useful when producing content for CD-ROM or DVD.
Common libraries not to be confused with shared libraries) are essentially stripped-down .fla files, containing only the assets you would use in a movie with none of the timeline or scripting, which are placed in the Libraries folder within the Flash 5 folder on your hard drive. Note that we're talking about system-level folders here, not folders within the Flash library.
A common library is available via the Flash menu bar in the authoring environment to any Flash project you begin.
Shared libraries are more complex and powerful than common libraries. Essentially a shared library consists of one or more externalized assets. Shared libraries let you save components of a Flash movie (or more likely, components to be used repeatedly in a series of movies) in their own files with their own URLs. These are separate .swf files which the Flash player automatically integrates into the main .swf at playback.
The shared-library technique is potentially quite useful for Internet development. Consider this scenario: you've created a lengthy, complex animation like Nosepilot, using many assets that appear and recur. For maximum effectiveness, you segment your movie into several parts. If an asset is used in more than one part, you should store it in a shared library. That way it only needs to be loaded the first time it is used; it will remain in cache memory for its subsequent appearances.
Look closely at the process for creating shared libraries. It has twists and turns, such as the requirement that a shared asset's identifier not be the same as its name in the library; and the fact that you must export the shared library as a Shockwave file and install it at the appropriate URL.
Plus there are some downsides to shared libraries. If the shared library contains more than one asset, all its assets are loaded as soon as the first one is called for. You can get around this problem by keeping the population of shared libraries as small as possible, or by grouping assets logically according to their use.
Chapter 14
This chapter covers the Movie Explorer, a useful and relatively straightforward project-management tool introduced in the current version of Flash. Using the Movie Explorer, you can view and manipulate a tree diagram of your entire project. The tree includes branches for all the elements of your timeline (scenes, layers, keyframes), as well as branches for the assets in your library, including their timelines in the case of clips and buttons.
This last feature can become confusing. When you use the Movie Explorer, remember the distinction between symbols (library assets) and instances (those symbols as they occur in the main movie and other timelines.
Finally, think about this interesting observation: "A project can contain hundreds of elements...." So it can; but can you imagine a Flash project that would? Especially after the Allaire merger, Macromedia seems to be Thinking Big. But what new genres, beyond than Web sites and intranets, do they have in mind?
