Changes to the application interface

- [Instructor] Just about every new version of Adobe Animate contains slight changes to the user interface to either improve things or add new functionality. There are some significant changes to take note of in this release. The first has to do with the file menu. If we choose File, you'll see there's now a subcommand called Convert To, and here we can convert to different document types. So since I'm using an ActionScript 3 document type here, I can change this to HTML 5 Canvas, WebGL or additional custom formats that I have installed.

Let's go over to the Properties panel, and these are the properties for our document right now. And we can see that we can target Flash Player 17 in this case, since it is an ActionScript 3.0 document. However, I can target all the way up to Flash Player 26 if I want to. And we also have AIR 26 for Android, desktop or iOS. Flash Player 26 and AIR 26 are the latest versions of Flash Player and AIR integrated into Adobe Animate with this release.

Going over to the Library panel, a lot of people don't realize this, but if you expand the Library panel, there are a number of different columns and you can actually sort by all of these different columns. Previous versions of Animate, when you move between documents, when you close Animate down, the columns would reset. In this version, the columns and what you've done to configure them will actually be remembered from session to session. We'll go ahead and shrink that down again to its normal size and go back to the Properties panel.

Let's go to Window and open up the Components menu. I'm going to simply add a new layer to my project right here. And just pull in a user interface component, maybe a button. And then close that out. So previous versions of Animate, you would see a component properties area of the Properties panel when you have a button selected, as I do right here. However, this has been replaced with a dedicated panel.

If we choose Show Parameters, then we get the Component Parameters panel, which has all of the parameters for this particular component. Note that I'm dealing with an ActionScript 3 document right now, but this will also work in HTML Canvas 5 documents. Let's close this out and remove the layer I just added along with the component. This particular animation, if we scrub through, takes advantage of the camera to do zooms and pans and so forth.

However, sometimes it is necessary to actually reset the camera. If I choose the Camera tool from the Tools panel, then I get my camera properties here, position, zoom, rotate, and since this is an ActionScript 3 document type I also get access to tint and adjust color. Previously, if I wanted to actually reset any of these I would have to do it manually by clicking on them. And then typing in a new default value. However, as you can see here we now have reset buttons for each particular property.

So if I want to reset the position, all I need to do is click that and it's reset to negative one on both x and y. Same thing with zoom, rotation, or any of the other properties that have this little reset icon alongside them. All of these changes serve to make Animate even more friendly to use moving forward.