Possibly Useful
We’ve been using this here in the offices for a while now, but now that we have this handy dandy “labs” site, we finally have a way to share it with other people too. It’s an MXP which adds two panels to your Window -> Other Panels menu.
The “Useful Instance Helper” lets you batch modify movieclip instances that are on the stage in the IDE. The top field is handy when you have an instance of a movieclip that lives across many keyframes and you want to give them all the same name without clicking on every single frame, then selecting the instance, and then typing in its name. Just pick a layer, enter a name, and press “set”.
Just below that are a pair of buttons which let you swap out items on the timeline/stage with whatever you have selected. Let’s say you have fifty snowflakes onstage, and you want to swap all of them out with leaves. You’d select them all, click on the leaf item in your library, and press “swap selected”. The “swap on layer” button runs across all of the keyframes on the layer and replaces anything it encounters with whatever’s currently selected in your library.
The “Useful Timeline Helper” contains a set of buttons which reduce otherwise many-clicked actions into a single action. One button adds “actions” and “labels” layers. Another converts all frames you have selected into keyframes with “stop();” actions.
Give ‘em a shot and let us know what you think.
