this is portable

Despite the coolness factor of a feature like scale 9, the first time I’ve used it in a real project was just a few days ago. I was happy to finally have a place to use it but I managed to run into one of its main drawbacks that usually gets mentioned in passing or not at all.

If you rotate or skew a clip with scale 9 guides enabled, it will look different on the stage than it does when published. And by “different”, I mean completely wrong.

I created a photo frame movie clip with scale 9 guides set, layered the frame to a couple of photos, and dragged them to the stage. So far so good.

Everything worked as expected until I rotated the movie clips. On the stage while editing the file, the frames looked pretty bad.

After a little playing around I realized that despite their appearance on the stage, the frames scaled and rotated just fine in the published file. The image below is the same file viewed as a published SWF as opposed to an open FLA being editied.

If the flickr pictures and other blog posts that were more coherent than mine didn’t convince you to attend the adobe onAir Bus tour stop near you maybe this video will help. Its a summary of the Pittsburgh onAir stop done by the Pittsburgh Flash User Group (PittMFUG) .

Can’t make it to a bus tour stop? The onAir Bus Tour site has a page of videos of some of sessions that were given over the course of the tour so far as well.