What are some best practices and tips for editing Flash files that I didn create?
When I needed to do this last year (in a slightly different situation, because I was mostly dealing with my own legacy code from the Flash 5 days), one thing that helped me was to write some JSFL to dump out all the contents of the movie to a text file, so that I could see where the ActionScript was hiding. I don’t know if it will be useful to you, but here’s the code I used–it’s a Ruby script that generates and runs a JSFL script to write a description of a FLA to a text file. Call it at the command line with the names of the FLAs you want to dump. (I know it’s not as convenient as it could be–I’m working on a Mac, so I’ve got Ruby installed automatically–but you might be able to get something useful from it). Within Flash, the Movie Explorer pane is your friend, especially if you’re not on a Mac. (And, honestly, if you are on a Mac, you should see if you can’t find a Windows box to do your Flash work on–it’s amazing how much fa
Are there well-known ways for flash designers to piece together how something is built? There are best practices and then there’s Flash. It all really depends on who did the piece and the skill level. Riemann laid out the possibilities pretty well, I’d add that the Movie Explorer is your friend, and oddly enough, a swf decompiler can sometimes give you more info than the IDE in the nightmare cases of code on nested movieclips. If you’re lucky, everything will be laid out in AS2. If not, have fun 😉 re: coming up to speed with Flash 8, there aren’t any major leaps to worry about since 7 (unless you start doing BitmapData stuff). More people are moving to using Delegate, Broadcaster, and the newer event model stuff, but those have actually been around for a while. The switch from AS2 -> AS3 will be a bigger deal with Flash 9, but it’s still not bad.
