Do you ever use invisible buttons? No shape except in the hit state. They are very useful because they show up as a translucent blue shape in the authoring environment, but don’t show up when published. You can apply them to existing graphics, such as imported bitmaps, to create buttons or hotspots.
The procedure is to create a rectangular graphic, convert it to a button, edit the button and drag the shape to the hit state frame, exit edit mode, size and shape it to where you want it.
It dawned on me that this would be a pretty easy tool to create. I was right. In under an hour I had this:
www.flashextensibility.com/files/tools/InvisibleButton.zip
It appears as a tool on your tool bar. Select it and draw a shape as easily as using the rectangle tool. Voila! An invisible button. Draw as many as you want, it only keeps a single item in the library.
Personally, I think this is the simplest and most useful tool I’ve created or seen yet. I know it will save me a lot of time.
Thanx a lot Keith, but the link seems broken 🙂
works for me…
but try this one:
http://www.bit-101.com/InvisibleButton.zip
very cool man.. Thanks for doing this.
Nice one Keith, that is definitely a tremendous time-saver! Keep up the good work 🙂
Nice one 🙂
So theorethically it should be possible to make a: ‘Shape tool without outline’, I’d love to see that in the Flash IDE!
Hello,
One remark on an otherwise neat extension:
The extension automatically draws the button on the _root layer. That takes the time-saving to a lower level …