Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

in a flash? hardly

I’ve been working on a graphic off and on for the past week, and it’s just killing me.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the graphic itself or what I plan on doing with it. But Flash has been less than cooperative this time around.

This experience has taught me that if I port hundreds upon hundreds of objects from Freehand to Flash and put them on a single layer, Flash will … register its displeasure.

My goal is to convert most of these graphic objects into movieclips, so that I can programmatically control them (change their color, make them clickable, etc.) via ActionScript. In theory, this is a simple task.

But with so many objects on a single layer, Flash is showing a decided lack of enthusiasm for my endeavor. I’ll click on an object, and it’ll take upwards of a minute — sometimes longer — for Flash to actually register my action and show that the object has been selected. Any subsequent interaction with that object or with other objects on that layer — no matter how simple — registers a similar excruciating delay. And this is on a (pre-Intel) Mac G5 tower.

I have noticed that if I move objects from an overloaded layer to an empty layer, interacting with them is a much speedier affair. If I had it to do over again, I would move groupings of objects to their own layers in Freehand before transferring the graphic over to Flash, which might, in theory, save me some of this aggravation. But I’m too far along at this point to start over.

So in the meantime, it’s click … wait … wait … wait … and so on.

The finished product better rock after all this.