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I've spent all day trying to accomplish a very simple task. I want to make an interactive button, with a particular shape, which, when clicked, displays some text. Could anything be simpler? But at every turn with Animate I'm forced to learn Actionscript. This is like buying a car and being given a book on automotive engineering. Seriously, is there an alternative to this piece of trash? I mean really, I can hardly believe any human being has the patience to learn this program.
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why are you creating an actionscript document? are you trying to make a mobile app?
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Are you just jumping into Animate and seeing what you can do?
It's actually very, very easy to create a button.
Adobe Animate User Guide > How to create buttons with Animate
https://helpx.adobe.com/in/animate/user-guide.html/in/animate/using/creating-buttons.ug.html
There are also come great tutorials here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/in/animate/tutorials.html
From what you're described, you should just need a Button Symbol in one Frame and the text you want to display in another. I've found it helfpul to use Labels to control which Frame a button jumps to.
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If you consider Animate trash and find it so problematic to use - there is other software out there. Honestly, it isn't for everyone and that is fine!
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Joesph it is shockingly bad. I have done some cool things in it but it is a constant wrangling of tools that work in very odd ways. I can give you just a few examples: I wanted a stroke that I could resize length without resizing the width. Great adobe has a scale control. It is so wonky it shows one width in the symbol a totally different width outside of the symbol and and even different width when published.
3D is so bizzare, when you use the manual controls it jerks into a new position, never where you set it. The only way to use it at all without odd behavior is changing the values in the panel and even that does not work well at times.
Easing OMG! so frustrating, it should not change the length of the animation ever. That is not the way easing works everywhere else! If I have a 5 second animation and add an in and out ease, those should happen within the 5 seconds.
Constant issues with sending things to Media Encoder it breaks every other release. With the current update nothing happens when you send something from Adobe Animate to the Media encoder unless you have ME open already.
Using Asset warp with html5 rarely works. Usually you get dropped frames and objects disappearing.
I could go on. These are very big bugs and odd UX.
Having said that Adobe finally made it an html5 authoring tool that exports pretty cleanly and optimized, way too late but they did it! The rigging tools work well as does the asset warp tool as long as you are exporting to video.
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I think that each of your points may have an answer. Could be worth posting questions, one topic at a time.
For the Adobe Media Encoder breaking every release, there is something that happens on macOS that could look like that. The security in the system won't let one app that you have given permission to open, open another app that you have not given permission to open. That means every update to AME requires you to open it up, and give permission for it to open. Having done that once you can quit AME, and Animate will successfully send to media encoder, opening the application if it is not already open.
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I believe I have brought up these points. They are bugs and not great UX. Another glaring issue is .swf export. Nothing can play a .swf any more nor does Adobe even have a player any more. In order to take advantage of the 3D stuff you have to publish as a swf for preview unless you want to do create a video each time there is no preview. This should be fixed.
Media Encoder not launching could have to do with what you say but why not then have a dialog box that prompts you to do this?? Also frequently it randomly does not work. My entire team has experienced this. I have used Flash/Animate longer than any one I know and I am just disappointed it does not get a bit more love. I code all my animations now but it would be great to use Animate for quick video projects and not fight the application to use it.
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do you want help doing any of the above?
if you want help, explain the issue with steps that can be replicated .
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The devs and community experts in this forum do nothing but blame the users for justly criticizing their programs. Rather immature imo
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Animate is very user-friendly compared to most animation programs and once you get it figured out, you too will feel the same.