Flash CS3 Undo Button Wastes Space
I 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?
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.
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.
So what might be a suitable solution? How about this for starters…
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) but later more-advanced versions of Flash don’t.
Okay, if they can’t let me dock the Main Toolbar above or below the Tools Panel, maybe they can try the following solution…
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. 😉 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)
but they won’t let you add any of the tools found in the Edit Toolbar, Controller Toolbar, or the Main Toolbar. 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.
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?
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All good points! However, I think a way-more fundamental UNDO/REDO problem is its core non-functionality, whether that is achieved through a key-press or a GUI button click.
For years now UNDO/REDO will only undo or redo _some_ things in Flash. My current CS4 installation won’t let me undo adding a guide, say, or arbitrarily prevents me from undoing some actionscript edits if I flick back to the canvas.
Despite redo/undo functionality in other Adobe products being quite good, Flash still suffers – the Flash Undo Button is a “waste of space” in more ways than one!
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Stephen Koch, I dunno, I don’t have access to a Mac but it’s definitely an issue on the PC. You have a Mac?
Is this only a PC issue?
Gah! You could rent all that wide open space out for grazing rights, build a ranch on it, and still have room for an Output panel or two! 😉
Here’s what I don’t get, you (the figurative you) pay a few hundred for a new monitor and complain when 2 or 3 pixels are D.O.A. but when you spend a few hundred dollars for an applications and it lays waste to hundreds upon hundreds of pixels, it’s accepted as standard practice. What’s up with that?
Aah, the everlasting topic of screen-real-estate waste and the makers who never get it right! I admit the new CS GUI is lightyears ahead of the former one (the one Dreamweaver and Fireworks still use) but some things are simply wasted. You can add the Print button on ANY application to the list! How often are you going to print out your work stuff that you need a print button in the GUI?!
But I don’t even display the Main Toolbar on my setup so I don’t care much about that. The biggest space waster in Flash CS3 is the right half of the properties panel (esp. on a widescreen), check out this screenshot … http://files.hexagonstar.com/images/misc/flcs3.jpg How often did I wish to put a second panel in that space, e.g. the output panel!