Edit in Place = The best thing ever
Mark Carolin showed me this really cool feature in Flash many moons ago that I use all day everyday. If you've ever tried to click on an empty movieclip, or a movieclip with 0% alpha graphics, etc. you know it can be a pain in the ass. Well this little trick saves me a lot of time and frustration.
First, you need to open keyboard shortcuts. If you haven't already, make a duplicate set (so you can edit it) and name it whatever (I used my first name). Expand the [+] Edit menu and scroll down until you find Edit in place. I set this little gem to ALT+~ (tilde) on Windows. My hand is usually hovering near there anyway from years of undo/copy/paste, and of course, WASD.
What this allows you to do now is select a movieclip and press this shortcut and it goes inside it as if you double-clicked on it. That may sound unexciting, but where the real power of Edit In Place comes in is if you only have a single movieclip on a layer, you can simply click on the keyframe in the timeline, OR just click on the layer, press this shortcut and you go right into the movieclip!
It's simply fantastic. I don't know how I got by without it and I recommend it to everyone I can.
Posted in Flash, Tips/Tricks
April 5th, 2007 at 9:49 am
Sweet, thanks Steven.
September 10th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Great idea Steven. thnks