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A
Anonymous
August 9, 2007
Answered

FlashHelp skins with no animations?

  • August 9, 2007
  • 1 reply
  • 480 views
Hi,

My company uses FlashHelp to produce an online manual for our product. FlashHelp works because it is fully cross-platform, unlike WebHelp (which breaks in Safari). Unfortunately all the skins included with FlashHelp have extraneous animations that force the user to wait for their content. For example, if you click a book that contains many topics, you must wait while FlashHelp slowly displays them all. It should display all topics *immediately*. Also, most skins have needlessly long load times (while the skin renders itself over the span of about 5 seconds--it should render as fast as possible) and annoying animations when you click a topic.

My question is this: are there any FlashHelp skins that do not have any animations (or animations under 1 second) but instead behave more similarly to WebHelp? If not, can I customize the current skins to not have any animations? I checked the FlashHelp SDK directory and it included fla files for buttons and toolbars but I did not see any timeline movie clips. Is it possible to manually remove these animations? I hope so, because several of the skins look quite nice--they just force users to watch animations they don't want to see.
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Correct answer
I doubt any of the Flash skins are entirely without animations because animation is the main point of Flash. You can edit the .fla files yourself if you have Flash. I have done this with our skins because one of our customers doesn't like the help system to be flashy (pardon the pun), but I still like using FlashHelp because I can customize it and it's cross-platform. Instead of using the SDK, however, I usually generate the output first using a skin from the gallery that I want to go from, such as Slate, and then edit the .fla files in the !SkinSubFolder! directory within my project folder.

Here is a specific example. skin_textNode.swf makes text like the TOC entries slide in from the right when displayed and back out when hidden. I got rid of that by doing the following:

1. Open skin_textNode.fla in Flash and double-click on the "Label" object on the stage to get the timeline.
2. Select the object again and click on the first keyframe in the timeline. The Properties Inspector gives me the exact coordinates of the object's location (X: 0.2, Y: -0.8).
3. Click on the next keyframe, click once on the object, and enter those same coordinates.
4. Do this on all keyframes where the Label object is in a different location than in the first keyframe.

After doing this, when I export the movie and view it in the help, the items in the TOC just come down out of the containing book instead of sliding back and forth, cutting down the load time a bit.

If you get rid of some of the extraneous animations in the toolbar buttons and so forth, I believe this cuts the load time down a little more. I have just opened one of my help systems, and it takes 3 seconds from the time I click "Help" in the application. (Some of this, I think, is the scripts that have to run.) You need to know just the very basics of Flash to tweak the skins and get rid of some of the "flashiness."

Hope this helps!

--Ben

1 reply

A
Anonymous
Correct answer
August 10, 2007
I doubt any of the Flash skins are entirely without animations because animation is the main point of Flash. You can edit the .fla files yourself if you have Flash. I have done this with our skins because one of our customers doesn't like the help system to be flashy (pardon the pun), but I still like using FlashHelp because I can customize it and it's cross-platform. Instead of using the SDK, however, I usually generate the output first using a skin from the gallery that I want to go from, such as Slate, and then edit the .fla files in the !SkinSubFolder! directory within my project folder.

Here is a specific example. skin_textNode.swf makes text like the TOC entries slide in from the right when displayed and back out when hidden. I got rid of that by doing the following:

1. Open skin_textNode.fla in Flash and double-click on the "Label" object on the stage to get the timeline.
2. Select the object again and click on the first keyframe in the timeline. The Properties Inspector gives me the exact coordinates of the object's location (X: 0.2, Y: -0.8).
3. Click on the next keyframe, click once on the object, and enter those same coordinates.
4. Do this on all keyframes where the Label object is in a different location than in the first keyframe.

After doing this, when I export the movie and view it in the help, the items in the TOC just come down out of the containing book instead of sliding back and forth, cutting down the load time a bit.

If you get rid of some of the extraneous animations in the toolbar buttons and so forth, I believe this cuts the load time down a little more. I have just opened one of my help systems, and it takes 3 seconds from the time I click "Help" in the application. (Some of this, I think, is the scripts that have to run.) You need to know just the very basics of Flash to tweak the skins and get rid of some of the "flashiness."

Hope this helps!

--Ben
A
Anonymous
August 10, 2007
Hi Ben,

Thanks! Your reply answered my question completely.
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