Annoying Blue Bounding Box in Adobe Flash (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog)
I’m introducing Adobe Flash to my New Media Projects course next week. I’ve fiddled with Flash before, but I haven’t yet worked through the examples in our book. My simian curiosity got the better of me, and I started clicking buttons at random. I suddenly noticed that all the shapes I drew had this dumb blue box, and I couldn’t select line segments or cut shapes into smaller sections anymore.
The problem is I had clicked the “Object Draw” button, which forces Flash to treat each shape (in this case a circle) as a single unit. The interface mocks me… the relevant button in the Options section is, of course, a circle with a blue box around it. (Why didn’t I think of that sooner? Duh.)
Spent about 10 minutes being frustrated by this, which was frustrating, since I’m counting down the minutes since I’ve got to get out of the office and head for home.
Update: It took me a little longer than the 50 minutes I alotted for the classroom exercise, but I did finish a simple Flash animation. Getting it to display online will have to wait for another day.
Cool, Dennis! I remember learning basic Flash animation in a computer science course on web design at UWEC. Our lab exam consisted of creating a background with a road and cars constantly moving up and down it while an insect crossed the road. The animation ended when a car hit the insect. Designating a path for the insect proved difficult because of how precise our lines needed to be coming off our animated object, so I wonder if that aspect is improved or not.