22.1 Planning the Application

You should begin designing the Flash Paint application by determining the necessary elements and mapping out how they should work together. The list of desired functionality in the previous section gives you a good idea of which elements you will need to develop. Essentially, there are four basic elements:

Toolbar buttons

These are the buttons that allow the user to select which type of action to take, be it selecting items, drawing shapes, colorizing shapes, etc.

Color selector

The color selector is the means by which a user can select the current color to use for drawing shapes, adding text, or filling or colorizing shapes or text.

Shapes

Shapes can be drawn by the user. A shape can be a line, a rectangle, or an ellipse.

Text

Text items, like shapes, are units that are added and modified by the user.

All of these elements can be contained within a single Flash document. At this point you should open a new Flash document and save it as flashPaint.fla. This is the document to which you should add all of the code and other modifications that are contained within the following sections. The final version is available at http://www.person13.com/ascb.