I just received a Flash project from the person who was my mentor, the one who introduced me to Flash and ActionScript. I opened it up, and was shocked to find how… awkward the thing was.
The code was mostly tight. Where it was really messed up was in the button instances. He was actually using buttons, and not movie clips. To achieve color changes for rollovers and the like, he used multiple instances of the buttons, changing the alpha value of an overlay to change the color effect.
For button labels, he had static text fields in place on top of the buttons… I guess to avoid making multiple symbols with static text fields? As opposed to dynamic text fields with text assigned via code, perhaps?
I know there are many paths that lead to the top of the mountain, and that the end user won’t know any different. But I figured this man would always be ahead of me and now I find in some significant ways I have passed him by.
thanks for letting me vent.
