Using the Launcher Bar icons, you can track the position of an object, change an object's color, alter the characteristics of text, associate a behavior with an object, find a shared asset, attach an action to an object, or create a new asset library. In addition to being able to dock the tool palettes, you can save and recall different layout states for the program's windows. Like Adobe, Macromedia is making the tool layout, menu structure, and color selection palettes consistent across the company's applications. This latest version lets multiple programmers access the assets from symbol libraries that are stored separately from a project. When you change a shared asset, the change automatically ripples through all the projects that use the asset.
Assets are also shared and reused within a project.
Because each asset is downloaded only once, this can dramatically reduce downloading times for large projects. As a Web site becomes more complex, it becomes harder to track the structure of the site. Flash 5 adds a Movie Explorer, which shows the assets as a hierarchy of nested objects. For Web sites constructed entirely in Flash, the Movie Explorer is almost a necessity for searching text, fonts, and symbol names. While Flash 4 offered interactivity through variables, object properties, and conditional logic, programmers couldn't get at the guts of the underlying code.