The other day, I had a support ticket from a customer named Charlotte who wanted to know if its possible to enter custom hex code into the color palette. She had to create a flash banner movie and wanted to match the exact color from her company logo. She wanted to know if there is an option to enter hex code. Looking at the color palette, one may notice that this option is not easy to locate, as a matter of fact its hard to recognize to say the least.

So where can one enter the hex code? If you look at the color palette, you’ll see the hex code displayed for the chosen color. The rectangular area is actually a text box that you can type into. This means you can enter your own hex code and the color palette will take it.

Block and Type, finally press Enter

You’ll notice that the text that you type in may not be visible. This is because the textbox and the font color are both white. You’ll have to block the region (i.e. select the code displayed) and then type in your hex code. Remember to press Enter key after you enter the color code. Simply entering the code won’t set it to the desired color.

I hope this tip helps when working with your flash movies. Thanks to Charlotte for bringing this up.

Recently when working with a customer on a video file issue with the Flash Builder, I noticed something interesting that is worth a mention. When you drag an item on to the Toufee Flash Builder movie maker stage, Toufee adds a default Fade In and Fade Out effects to the item. This goes applies to any item – text, image or video.  There is no Fade In/Fade Out effects for Sound items as its logical the flash effects are visual in nature. And one day, one of the customers reported that his video file was not getting started immediately and usually takes a few seconds to start in. I initially didn’t realize the Fade In effect myself and found that it could be causing the problem. The Fade In effect duration is nearly 2 seconds so this was the delay customer was referring to. Turning off the setting made the video look much better.

Removing the Fade In effect

To remove the Fade In effect, simply drag the slider for the Fade In such that it is zero. Earlier, we did have an option where one could directly adjust the slanted triangle-like marker (that denotes the effect duration) in the Timing section to modify the flash effect duration. However, this was retired as it was sometimes difficult to work with when the flash effect duration was particularly small (such as a 1 second effect).

You would notice that once the Fade In effect is removed  there wouldn’t be the this slanted triangle before the Video label in the Timing bar. This is a visual indication that the Fade In effect does not exist on the item.

The same steps apply to removing the Fade In or the Fade Out flash effect on any item such as text or images. Remember that the Fade In effect property only controls the timing of the “Fade In”. The actual effect, or the effect type is determined by the In Effect dropdown list under the General Properties section. The In Effect property is used to select the effect that would be applied as Fade In.