I recently purchased FW Pro and have been working with it off and on for about 3 weeks. Due to my real job I haven’t been able to just jump in and dedicate the necessary time to fully understand the complete structure of FW, but feel that I am making good progress.
FW has some tremendous features which are far superior to the design program that I was using in Windows, but there is a learning curve, which I feel that I can master, given time.
The subject at hand is Rollovers, Rollover instructions, and the final file structure.
What I am working on is a simple set of rollover buttons, 6 in total. The first problem that I had, after watching the videos and reading the manual was simply getting to the action to create the initial rollover. As it turned out the instructions said create a third object (text object) → select all 3 objects → group → align → apply the rollover action. However this would never allow me to get to the rollover action. What I had done was use 2 graphics and my third was an HTML object, thinking that it was supposed to be an HTML object for the text. Finally after a whole bunch of trial and error I found that the text object was actually supposed to be a graphic, and what do you know, I could now apply the rollover action.
What the above really says is that there needs to be some improvement in the instructions in both the videos and the written manual.
Next problem:
The instructions state that you can duplicate the rollovers simply by holding down the Option key and drag. Well, that doesn’t work on my system. I have to use the main menu option → duplicate → drag the duplicate into position and then repeat those steps for each rollover. By doing the above I was able to get my 6 rollover buttons.
Next problem:
When I created my rollovers, I of course did that on the master page for use later in all of my additional pages. Works great! However, what I see as a problem is that I should end up with 12 graphic objects, 2 objects for each of the 6 rollovers. Each of the 6 rollovers should be different because of the variable text for each button. However, in the end result each page created from the master may end up with additional images, and these images will have to be loaded as each page is called, whereas the initial 12 images that I refer to above should be the only ones called from the Resource folder.
What happens when you are on dial-up (which I am not, but do use it to test functions) is that each page loads the rollover buttons in a choppy manner as opposed to simply flashing onto the page based on what has already been downloaded and held in the browsers cache.
I haven’t use Preload in the past, but my understanding of it is that it is supposed to preloads objects so that they can be displayed, for lack of other words, in a flash like action. Perhaps I am wrong here.
Perhaps I am all wet behind the ears here, or perhaps I am doing something wrong, but this is what my experience has shown me so far.
I sure wouldn’t mind hearing what others have experienced regarding this, and if I may be missing something.
Loren
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