I spend over 75% of my workday in Flash, and it’s time I really do enjoy. If I’m not coding up a custom MP3 player, I’m designing character models for an interactive mascot or working out the navigation for a corporate slideshow. Heck, I even do video work in Flash, often using the main timeline and manual tweens to export animation for use in title sequences and interstitials that don’t end up anywhere near the Web. With each new release, Flash keeps getting better; but as much as I value the authoring environment, I’m quick to grant it doesn’t do everything I need.

Over the years, I’ve gathered a handful of free 3rd party tools that I use so often, I find myself shocked when reaching for them on a friend’s computer and—poof!—they’re not there. The computers I use most often (my main workstation and laptop) both run some flavor of Windows, so I apologize in advance to those of you who prefer alternate operating systems. My list is comprised of many tools that are only available for Windows, so I’ll detail those first and round out my report with some very handy extensions that will run on any platform that supports Flash MX 2004 (Flash 7) or higher, because they run in Flash.

General purpose tools

Meazure (C Thing Software)

This little app is a measurement powerhouse. It allows you to gather RGB color information (complete with magnified preview area), determine the distance between any two pixels on the screen, determine the angle between any two points in degrees or radians, and even report width and height of any open window. This can be very helpful when dealing with instructional design work, such as tutorials, or software simulation.

ColorPic (Iconico)

This takes the color gathering aspect of Meazure and packs it to overflowing with practical features. ColorPic can sample swatches from anywhere on the screen in decimal and hexadecimal notation, RGB and CMYK. The preview area is resizable, and color samples can be taken from a single point, 3×3, or 5×5 averaged areas. Whole palettes of samples can be compared and even saved for later use.

Magnifier (Iconico)

Windows has a built-in magnifier app (under Accessories > Accessibility), but this one is much more intuitive. When the mouse is over the app’s window, a menu appears that allows you to change the zoom, show or hide a grid overlay, and configure other preferences; when the mouse is elsewhere on the screen, the menu auto-hides, giving you an unobstructed, magnified view of the area around the mouse. From there, you can zoom with the mouse wheel. This is great for getting detailed close-ups in situations where zooming is inconvenient or otherwise impossible.

StrokeIt (TCB Networks)

Admittedly, the name of this app isn’t something you would necessarily mention within earshot of your mother, but wow, can it be useful! Once you understand what it does, you’ll even agree that the name makes sense. This is gesture recognition software. Like the handwriting interface on many PDAs and tablet PCs, StrokeIt is capable of understanding a specialized “alphabet” of mouse gestures you draw to the screen. What’s the purpose? Well, it can save you dramatically on keystrokes and mouse clicks. Using the app’s Command Editor, you can configure global and app-specific gestures to associate with common tasks that would normally be triggered by menu choices or key combinations. In fact, you can even launch programs with this approach. So, instead of contorting your fingers into arbitrary multi-keyed keyboard shortcuts—effectively playing Twister with your hands—just let your fingers rest on the mouse. Right-click and draw a fluid shape instead.

Flash extensions

Pixel Tools (Patrick Mineault)

Flash has four built-in tools that function more or less like hand-held drawing implements: Brush, Pencil, Pen, and Eraser. You make a selection from the Tools panel and start drawing (or erasing); simple as that. In the case of the Pen tool, you have the addition of editable anchor points familiar to designers who use Illustrator. These work well enough until you need to produce pixel art, say, for navigational icons or other crisply small figures. This is where the Pixel Tools’ extension will make you grin like a kid at Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Use the Adobe Extension Manager (under the Help menu in Flash) to install the MXP file and you get five new drawing tools: Pixel Rectangle, Pixel Ellipse, Pixel Line, Pixel Freehand, and Pixel Eraser. To add these to your Tools panel, create a new FLA document, then select Edit > Customize Tools Panel. You’ll get a dialog box with a representation of the existing Tools panel on the left. Select the Eraser tool, for example, then scroll within “Available tools” to find Pixel Eraser tool and add it to “Current selection.” Repeat for each new tool, placing it wherever makes the most sense to you. When you’re done, click the OK button. Now your Tools panel will have tiny indicators in the lower right corner of any icon that contains more than one tool. Click and hold to make your selection.

Selection Tools (Patrick Mineault)

The normal Selection tool in Flash allows you to click inside a fill to select it. If you start outside the fill and drag partially inside it, you can cut out rectangular pieces by deleting your selections, but there isn’t a way to make a partial selection that begins inside a fill. To remedy this, install the Select Inside tool from this MXP file as described in the previous extension. Additionally, this extension includes a Select Line tool, comparable to Photoshop’s Single Row/Column Marquee tools. The thickness of your selection depends on the stroke setting configured in the Property inspector while this new tool (or any tool that supports a stroke) is selected.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.