Flash: A best practices guide

A parting note as I tidy up / revamp what I hope are my last series of Flash movies here. If you know your source files are going to be handed over to other designers or programmers, please:

1. Label your layers. Especially when you have twenty of them per file.
2. Name your elements. It gets disparaging looking at a library full of names like Symbol 23 and Tween 1. Even better, sort them into folders.
3. When etching out photos using image editing software, try applying something called anti alias. It helps, y’know, to make your graphics look smoother, so I don’t have to look for all the original photos again and re-crop them for you. That includes our client’s logo, which, above all things, should not be made to look tacky.
4. You can draw simple shapes in Flash. It saves file space, and vector graphics look SO much nicer. Try that next time, instead of importing rectangular photo borders.
5. If you know your files are still going to take a while for users to download, it would be useful to include a preloader. Don’t be lazy.
6. If you have a cluster of instances (objects) appearing one by one in sequence, try placing each instance in a separate layer instead of lumping them together increasingly, in a series of keyframes.
7. You use input text for forms. Not dynamic text.
8. Black text on brown is OH so passé. And illegible, too.
9. If the image you want to insert is only 200 pixels wide, you could try something called cropping. Instead of leaving lots of background space that does nothing.
10. It is often good practice, where Actionscript is used heavily, to leave // comments so we know what this code is supposed to do. I have found this extremely helpful in the past.

More pointers welcome.