Viewing improved dialogs and menus

One change that may seem small in CS 5.5 is the improvement to dialogs and menus. With these enhancements however, you can create and edit projects much more efficiently. First, let's take a look at the new Publish Settings window. You can access this through the PROPERTIES panel when you have everything deselected. In the PUBLISH area, click the Publish Settings button. So, you notice this window has kind of married all the features that used to be in Publish Settings, and it's much easier to access all of them.

So, I can simply check the check boxes to control the Publish Settings and then click on each one of them to control my individual settings. You can choose your different profiles, you can edit or rename or duplicate a profile, you can change your Player version right here, you can change the ActionScript version right here and adjust your ActionScript settings by clicking the wrench icon, change the Output file name in your SWF. You can see, all these things have always been there, but now we just have a better looking, easier to navigate menu to adjust them all.

So, I will close out that window and we will head over to the LIBRARY and double-click on BailSound.mp3. This is going to open up the Sound Properties window. Before, everything that had to do with ActionScript and Sound Compression is all grouped in a same area. Now Flash has separated these options and taps. So, in the Options area, you only see options for adjusting the compression of the sound and getting information about the sound. The ActionScript area only deals with ActionScript, so it's more organized and easier to use than ever before.

So, I will click Cancel, and then I will double-click a bitmap symbol on the library. You can see that the same thing has been applied for bitmaps. Here, we can view and adjust settings related to the bitmap here, and then you can click the ActionScript tab and only adjust settings that deal with ActionScript for this symbol. So, I will cancel out of this. And you can see that it's much more organized than it ever was before so it's easier to keep track of publish settings, sounds and bitmaps in Flash CS 5.5.

So, using the newly designed menus and dialog boxes, you can save time and improve your Flash workflow.