Flash Animation Tips & Tricks - MouseOver Effect and ;Stop Command

**HayTay** · 10 May 2009, 01:06 AM

While trying to achieve a mouse over effect in a Flash animation using Xara Web Designer for another thread, I came across several little known items of interest. The first item is the MouseOver Effect, itself, available under the Web Properties > MouseOver Tab > Jump to Frame section (see attached screen capture below). This allows you to jump to any frame of your animation when a user places the mouse pointer over your Flash animation. For those who may have missed that, I said "jump to any frame". Very powerful and very useful.

While I got that to work with little effort, there was an unfortunate and highly disturbing 'strobe effect' created by the animation continuously looping between my two frames. After several tries at fixing it myself I resorted to reading the XWD Help file. That's where I came across the other tip (or trick). There is a ;Stop Command that can be appended to the Frame name (ie. MouseOff;Stop) to stop the animation on that frame (again, see the attached screen capture below). That did the trick as you can see from the following two frame Flash animation.

How cool is that? And, now that you know how too, it's very easy.

There are all kinds of tidbits and goodies in the XWD Help file under the heading Flash Animations. The ;Stop Command and MouseOver Effect information that helped me fix my animation came from the Advanced Flash Commands subsection. There is also a BASIC like ;GOTO Command for viewing frames out of sequence. Alas, if you use the ;GOTO Command or ;Stop Command the frames are not tweened.

Needless to say I'll be reading the entire Flash Animations section to see what other tips & tricks can be had.

Let's see what else we can dredge up from the help file. Maybe covoxer can, and will, throw a few lesser known tidbits our way, also.

Cheers,
Harry

**steve.ledger** · 10 May 2009, 01:17 AM

That's the ticket

Thanks Harry!

**HayTay** · 10 May 2009, 01:20 AM

Y'elcome, Steve.

Glad to be of service.

**zaphodeist** · 10 May 2009, 01:58 AM

It's very cool Harry, thanks again for spotting and pointing it out

**Ken Anderson** · 10 May 2009, 03:33 AM

Interesting thread ... but in attempting to try the MouseOver features, when I open the animation frame gallery and click on the Properties tab, I don't see anything pertaining to MouseOver. I get the following tabs ... Frame, Flash Options, GIF Options, Animation Loop & Speed, and Preview in Browser. Am I missing something, doing something wrong, or do I have an earlier version of XWD?

**HayTay** · 10 May 2009, 03:43 AM

Ken,

You're not "missing something, doing something wrong, or...have an earlier version of XWD". You're just looking in the wrong spot.

Instead of looking in the Animation Properties dialog box available from the Frame Gallery > Properties window, try this. Right-Click (Alt-click) on one of the objects on your layer and select Web Properties from the pop-up menu. Now you should be able to find the Mouse-over tab from there.

IHTH,
Harry

**zaphodeist** · 10 May 2009, 03:45 AM

Sorry

**HayTay** · 10 May 2009, 03:56 AM

Originally Posted by neodeist

It's very cool Harry, thanks again for spotting and pointing it out

Yes, sir! Glad to help out fellow XWD (ab)users.

Originally Posted by neodeist

Sorry

Instead of self-editing your 'pointless post' and leaving an equally pointless 'sorry', why don't you post your shining example of the Mouse-over effect and ;Stop command in this thread for others to see? Even if it's for no other reason than to just let everyone else know I'm not the only one that can make this work.

Just a thought,
Harry

**zaphodeist** · 10 May 2009, 04:13 AM

One shining example as requested

**Ken Anderson** · 10 May 2009, 05:28 AM

I did find the correct bunch of options when clicking on an object rather than a line in the frame gallery, but a quick attempt to put the instructions to work on one of my little test files didn't pan out. I'll follow the thread to see if more comments are posted, then will get back in again and dig around. I guess what I was expecting to see was that a mouseover would "freeze" the animation at that moment. Maybe that's not what should be happening? I love XWD ... but it's leading me into learning some stuff that's pretty foreign to an old hand-coder!