I Don't Know Karate...
June 16, 2000
Suppose you made a cool button and you want to apply its
characteristics to all the icons you will use for buttons:
Your styles palette is your friend. Basically a style is all the
attributes of an object. You make your button that uses your Eye Candy
drop shadow, tweaked color, and flies in from the bottom of the page.
You can save all the attributes as a style and reuse the motive until
even you get sick of it. The program comes with some cool styles
already installed.
Think of styles as a place to store all the tweening parameters,
color information, and transform data (plus anything I'm forgetting)
in your library to call on and apply at any time.
There remain a couple more features worthy of brief note:
HTML
You always see newbies on the Flash BB's asking how to insert HTML
into a Flash movie. What could they possibly be imagining that they
would want to do this? What could Adobe have been thinking when they
answered the demand? What were they smoking, and where can I buy some?
Are these enough rhetorical questions about mysteries of the mind to
string together a TV special on "The Paranormal"?
The way it works is that LM slices your HTML and .swf into table
cells, a la Fireworks. Brilliant.
May I suggest that text looks much better in .swf, is easier to change
dynamically in .swf, and is available to do something interesting in
.swf. HTML in a LM movie? Please. If anyone should ever discover a
good reason for doing this, the tool is there for you.
Batch Replace
We already mentioned the ability to import Photoshop images. LM can
also execute batch processes to update tags in HTML docs with
images. This is a cool feature for people on the production end of
things who want to get a lot of grunt work done fast. Por exemplo:
Before &
After...
Two notes:
- Obviously, this example represents a minute or two of work (including
composition of profound poetry).
- I am a little confused and conflicted about why this feature is
included in this software. All I can make of it in my first appraisal
of LM is that Adobe is less intensely focused on strictly vector
images with this product. I haven't made up my mind whether I think
that's a good or bad thing.
If you use graphics for text headings regularly, this feature alone
is worth the price of the app. The process is very slick, fast, and
easy. You could update a whole site like this. The corporate-speak
literature on the Adobe site makes it kinda sound like you have to
use GoLive to enjoy this feature. False. How about this for a pitch:
"Live Motion offers seamless integration with Notepad for B2B
solutions..."
Gimme Sum Mo
Live Motion - Super Bad
if ($Give_It_up || $Turn_It_Loose){...
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