Recently one of our larger projects involved lots (hundreds!) of animations, each in it's own FLA. The animations were made to mimic a comic book, including text bubbles. The problem was that this project was an educational game focused on language comprehension. The students should only see the text bubbles as a last resort, and are penalized for turning them on. Add into this the fact that the text bubbles have to be able to be turned on and off at any time.

When the first set of animations arrived, we found that the only really constant was that all of the bubbles were in their own layers and these layers were in a layer folder. Sometimes there were symbols, sometimes not. None of the existing symbols had instance names. The last thing we wanted to have to do was to manually go through and fix hundreds of FLAs. JSFL to the rescue!

Using JSFL we were able to write a script that would take the selected layer folder, take all of the layers in it, put them into a movieclip, put an instance of that movieclip onto the stage and give it a standard instance name. The artists on the project would all just run this script before they published their FLAs and we were good to go.

The moral of the story is - build your own tools (and learn JSFL!). Developers can often greatly improve the productivity of their team by writing little scripts that do repetitive tasks. Sitting down with the JSFL help files and coding up the script maybe took 2-3 hours, but now all of our text bubbles work perfectly and we don't have to think any more about them or worry about the stray wierd error with them.