Flash: Doing Nothing Programatically?

Question

I received a Flash job to do the other day and none of it was done programatically. All transitions, rollovers, etc., were done with the built-in button states, layers, and all that stuff that I hardly ever work with except through code (since you can do it all by programming custom MCs). All the tweens actually seem to have been done by hand (right clicking "make tween" or whatever). Most problematically, a menu that was six items high was actually made by doing 6 layers in several places, so changing it involved going to all those places and changing.

I do not need help with the app as it required simple mods (all work x20, basically). However, my question is this: is it possible that the developer used some tool to actually make all those menus and so forth? Or did he really make them pixel by pixel instead of doing them programatically (write once, reuse forever)?

The way he/she did it seems foolish to me, but I'm asking here to make sure that I'm not the one missing the boat.

Answer 1

The author may have been a designer ... easier to read documentation on Flash vs learning to program ... some times brute force for some people is easier then a little time spent to get something reusable and customizable ...

Answer 2

you are not missing the boat : )

Flash is a great tool, but it inherits the quirks of its long history. It was primarily a design tool in the begining, the code aspect took off later. And to this day flash is both a coding platform and a designer tool. This can be a good / creative thing but it can also lead to very messy projects being built.