<\/p>\nI don’t know about you but when I’m interacting with the Flash graphical user interface (GUI), the command I tend to use most frequently is the “Undo” command. If you’re familiar at all with keyboard shortcuts you know that “control\/command Z” is THE universal Undo key combination. That’s handy and all if you don’t mind constantly being tethered to your keyboard while drawing or animating in the Flash GUI. But what if you just want to use your mouse alone? You know, use the FLash GUI like say maybe, a GUI?<\/p>\n
Of course Flash has an Undo button but for some reason it’s inextricably locked to the Main Toolbar panel (Menu>Window>Toolbars>Main) which is bad news for anyone trying to make efficient use of their monitor’s screen space. For some unknown reason, the Main Toolbar can only be docked (snapped into position) in the most bizarre space-consuming places imaginable. If you try docking the Main Toolbar along the screen’s left or right edges, its icons are aligned in 2 (why two?) columns side by side and a nice wide vertical slice of your precious screen real estate is reduced to a useless wasteland. See picture below.<\/p>\n
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A slightly more palatable option is to dock the Main Toolbar along the top or bottom edges of your screen. Choosing a horizontal orientation places the icons in 1 (why one now?) narrow single-file row but the row still extends almost the entire width of your screen, leaving a desolate swath of gray in its wake. See pic below.<\/p>\n
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So what might be a suitable solution? How about this for starters…<\/p>\n
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Simply docking the Main Toolbar under or over the Tools Panel reduces the wasted space by about 80 percent. That’s a pretty big reduction in my opinion but for some reason Adobe won’t let you dock one panel on top of the other. Dumb duh dumb dumb. Oddly enough, earlier versions of Flash (Macromedia) allowed this behavior (see image<\/a>) but later more-advanced<\/em> versions of Flash don’t.<\/p>\n Okay, if they can’t let me dock the Main Toolbar above or below the Tools Panel, maybe they can try the following solution…<\/p>\n As you recall, I started this article talking about the Undo Button. I didn’t really want to go off on a tangent about the poor “dockability” of the Main Toolbar but showing that particular toolbar is the only way to reveal the Undo Button so ranting was merely a logical progression. \ud83d\ude09 But, what if Adobe let you add any of the icons in the Main Toolbar (Undo, Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste, etc…) to the Tools Panel? Wouldn’t that be nice? Adobe created a tool to let you modify the Tools Panel’s icons (you can access it by going to Menu>Edit>CustomizeToolsPanel)<\/p>\n but they won’t let you add any of the tools<\/strong> found in the Edit Tool<\/strong>bar, Controller Tool<\/strong>bar, or the Main Tool<\/strong>bar. Isn’t that a little odd? I know I’d like to add Undo, Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste and PasteInPlace icons to my Tools Panel.<\/p>\n Does this sound like a good idea? I think it would be a MUCH better solution than all this crazy “docking” stuff. What’s your opinion?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A rant about Adobe interface design creating thousands of “dead pixels” instigated by the lack of a decent Undo button.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[28],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-flash","tag-adobe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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