As I’ve mentioned, I’m building out the UI component set for Ribbit. There have been quite a few setbacks on this process, the biggest ones being bugs in the Flash IDE itself. I’ve already blogged about the problems with inspectable setters and custom parameter UIs. Today’s problem has to do with component icons.
Yes, I’m getting down to the tail end of this project and taking care of details like adding in live previews and icons and documentation. So I go to associate custom icons with each of the components I created. How to do it?
Well, there is a IconFile metadata tag. That works if you are creating a SWC, but not otherwise. These will be FLA based components, so you can edit the assets.
Then, there is a little button you press in the Component Definition dialog. This gives you a dropdown of predefined icons. At the very bottom is an item for a custom icon. Nice! That opens up a file dialog allowing me to search for Fireworks (.png) files. Hey, that’s exactly what my icons are! Nice again!
But wait. I can’t select any of my icons. Must be in the wrong format or something. Mess around with that. No joy. Well it must work for the icons for the components that come with Flash. Hmm… no, that doesn’t work either. So how the hell did Grant get icons on his components???
As usual, the answer came from asking Grant directly. And the answer was pretty straightforward. “That doesn’t work on a Mac.”
Gah!
So here I am downloading Flash CS3 to my Parallels XP install, so I can add icons. Yay. Well, Grant said it took him 3 days to figure that one out. I wasted most of a day all told on it. Hopefully this will save a few other people a few more hours.
I gotta say, Adobe really dropped a few balls with CS3, particularly in terms of the IDE features required for making components and making them work. Hopefully, I’ve found the last one. 🙂