Pink and Ain't

It can be frustrating moving around in Flash.  Whenever you move to a new keyframe you almost always lose the selection you had previously.  I’ve made some commands to help avoid this problem.

These are designed to be drop-in replacements for the built-in Flash operations normally bound to the “>” and “<” keys.  In normal operation, those keys move the current frame marker forward or backward one frame.  They’re useful when you want to slowly go through your animation, or when you don’t want to have to go to the mouse to move to the next or previous frame.

The difference with my versions, though, is that now your selection will remain selected in the new frame.  That is, whatever symbols you had selected in the previous frame will also be selected in the new frame.  It’s fantastic for when you want to go through an animation one frame at a time and adjust the same element(s) on each frame.

There are six commands in this package:

1. Same object frame dec and Same object frame inc
   These commands move back or forward one frame, keeping the same selection.  If you had a symbol selected in the old frame and it exists in the new one, it’ll be selected there too. I have these bound to the hotkeys mentioned above – “<” and “>” respectively.
2. Same object keyframe dec and Same object keyframe inc
   These operate exactly the same way, except that they move to the next keyframe on the currently active layer. This is great for moving between keyframes without having to laboriously traverse the intervening non-key frames. I have these bound to the same keys as above, but while holding down
3. Same object go to first frame and Same object go to last frame
   These commands will move the current frame to be either at the beginning or the end of the timeline.

A couple notes about these tools:

1. They work best in Flash CS4 or earlier.  In CS5 Adobe changed something about how Flash updates the display after running a JSFL command. Now you can’t see what the screen looks like as-you-go – you have to stop and wait for it to update.  This means you can’t, for instance, just hold down the “>” key and see the animation go by slowly.  The reduced functionality of these tools is actually one of the main reasons I haven’t upgraded to CS5.
2. If a symbol doesn’t exist on the frame you move to, obviously it can’t be selected.
3. If you have more than one instance of the same symbol on the same layer then the tool can only track one of them.  There are some details behind this that I don’t really have the energy to go into here, but on the new frame probably only one of your two symbol instances will be selected.  For this reason I often end up duplicating symbols so that I can have more than one of them on the same layer and still have the frame navigation tools work properly (as well as autotween, which runs into a similar problem).

Here’s a video demonstrating my navigation tools:

And here’s a download link for the installation file:

Frame Navigation Commands

Usually, the tools that Flash provides natively are sufficient for dealing with transforms (the details of a symbol’s position, rotation, skew, and scale).  Sometimes, though, you need a little more.  I’m going to introduce two tools today that provide more flexibility in resetting symbols back to their default transform.

Reset Transform (improved)

When you hit ctrl-shift-Z in Flash it’ll reset the transform of all the selected symbols back to their default state.  That means 100% scale, with no rotation or skew.  But what if you want the default scale/rotation/skew to be something different?  Wouldn’t it be nice if you could define an arbitrary transform that you wanted ctrl-shift-Z to reset a symbol back to?

As you may have guessed, I’ve created just such a thing. It includes two Flash commands.

1. The first creates a reference symbol that has your definitions of your symbols’ default state.  All you have to do is put all your symbols on the stage in the position you’d like them to be in by default and call Commands->Create symbol scale reference. That creates a symbol in your library called _symbol_scale_reference in which all your symbols you had selected now reside, defining their default transform.
2. The is the command that does the resetting.  It simply takes the selected symbols and changes their transforms to match whatever is in _symbol_scale_reference.  If the reference symbol doesn’t exist then the command’s operation is identical to the standard Reset Transform command. I recommend switching your ctrl-shift-Z keyboard shortcut over to this command, since it’s functionally the same as the original Reset Transform but with the added functionality if you want it.

Reset transform (improved) installer

Zero Transform

But that’s not all!  I have another even cooler extension for you today!

One of the functions that I sorely missed for years in Flash was Zero Transform.  That’s a function that takes the current state of a symbol instance and makes it the zero point in the transform.  That is, after zeroing a transform, your selected symbol won’t have changed in appearance but its transform will now be 100% scale with 0 rotation and skew. Any 3d animation program worth its salt has this functionality, so why doesn’t Flash?

It took some doing, but I managed to write a Zero Transform command for Flash.  I use it all the time, and I think you may find it useful too.

Included are two commands: Zero transform as is and Zero transform at scale. The first is exactly as I described above, and the one I find most useful.  The second does something very similar, except that instead of resetting the transform so that it ends up at 100% scale, it does it so that it ends up an arbitrary X and Y scales that you specify.

I use Zero transform as is enough that I have it bound to an easy-to-remember keyboard shortcut: ctrl-alt-Z. I think of it as a more authoritative version of ctrl-shift-Z.

Zero Transform installer