When I create components for applications, as I already said in one of my previous post , I usually use Adobe Illustrator. I found out that sometimes, when I export an swf with my skin directly from Illustrator, it doesn’t work properly, so I import my components into Adobe Flash and then I put all the properties I need and finally I export the SWF file.
During this process something happens and I want to share with You some problems I’ve got.
When I create a symbol as a button with some gradient and a little arrow inside or some other graphics
and I import it into Flash, sometimes this components are transformed into a bitmap image without any reason, or at least I’ve never found the reason:)
If I check the properties when I do Copy and Paste from Illustrator to Flash, the “paste as bitmap” voice is not selected so this is not the problem.
When I discover that my symbol is a bitmap instead a vector element I just import it again from Illustrator since it’s ok and most of the time the only way to have a symbol that works, is to take away the shadows effect... :(
Another problem I had during this interaction between the two programs is that when a symbol has inside more elements, like a button as the one I’ve used for the first example, when I import them into the stage in Flash this is the result:
The Icon seems to have some troubles and it doesn’t appear as a vector element. In this case when I open the movie clip I discover that the graphics inside is divided into groups of elements
so I just get inside the icon group (I mean generally inside the symbol that has a problem) and I copy and paste it directly into the Movie clip keyframe/stage, taking it out from the group and so, surprise surprise, it works!
The third things I want to show you is a problem I had with 2 panels.
This is the image of the two panels I had to put into my application, there is a header and a panel under the header that goes up and down as you want to see the menu or not
This was the skin I created
With the developer we put it into Flex as a skin and there were problems with the movement of the second panel, it was like when you opened it, this panel was not well aligned with the other one and the icon “close menu” was moving all around.
After many, many attempts…lots of stress and trying every single logical solution we had in mind, we thought to move a little bit the graphic inside the movie clip element, changing the X and the Y from 0,0 (the value they usually must have to work properly in the applications) to 2.1, 1.0
and we still don’t understand why everything worked perfectly!
All these examples are to say that, even if we respect all the rules we know designing interface, often strange problems occurs and we must try to find a new way to solve those problems thinking with a creative approach and trying all the possible solutions even when they seem not to have a logic reason:)